Stacy Keach, the growling, weathered character actor who spent nearly six decades menacing, mentoring and occasionally getting murdered on screen, has died at age 85. His wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement that he passed away at their home in Magdalenka, Poland, following what she described as a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure.
Horror audiences will remember Keach best for his role in William Peter Blatty’s cult classic The Ninth Configuration which explores madness in a remote military psychiatric hospital. In Children of the Corn (1984), he played a diner owner done in by electrocution, courtesy of the film’s corn worshipping cult of children. A few years later, in the gleefully trashy Class of 1999 (1990), he turned up as a high school principal unlucky enough to have his heart torn out by a rogue android teacher. He also appears in Body Bags (1993), the horror anthology from John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, though the specifics of his segment there are less widely documented. Other appearances in genre film include Roadgames, Cell and Slave of the Cannibal God.
Outside the genre, Keach was best known for playing the hardboiled private eye Mike Hammer across two separate detective series, a role that became something of a signature. His other credits ranged from Fat City and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean to American History X, The Bourne Legacy and, more recently, Nebraska and Jay Kelly. He won a Golden Globe for playing Ernest Hemingway in the 1988 miniseries Hemingway, and earned a Tony nomination for the Broadway production of Indians.
Keach is survived by his wife and his children, Shannon and Karolina. Actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who played his son in the 2008 television movie Lone Rider, remembered him online as “one of the greats,” adding that he was “proud to have shared some frames with him.”
