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Stacy Keach dies at 85

moviesNov 11, 2026711,421

Stacy Keach died Tuesday at age 85 at his home in Magdalenka, Poland after "a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure," his wife Malgosia Tomassi Keach said. Keach became best known to television audiences as the scruffy private eye Mike Hammer but maintained a wide-ranging career that included films Fat City and The Ninth Configuration and TV roles on The New Mike Hammer, Prison Break, Titus and recurring work on Blue Bloods. He was a respected stage actor, earning a Tony Award nomination for Buffalo Bill in Indians, playing King Lear onstage and leading national tours of Frost/Nixon and Sleuth. Keach suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in June 2017 that forced the cancellation of a subsequent run of his one-man show Pamplona. In 1984 he was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport after trying to smuggle 1.3 ounces of cocaine concealed in an aerosol shaving cream can; he served time in prison. He won a Golden Globe for portraying Ernest Hemingway in a six-hour miniseries for which he gained 35 pounds, and colleagues including Lou Diamond Phillips praised him as a consummate actor who was gracious and kind.

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