American actor Stacy Keach, known for playing Mike Hammer and Ernest Hemingway, dead at 85

Actor Stacy Keach, who portrayed rugged characters such as fictional detective Mike Hammer and legendary American novelist Ernest Hemingway, died on Tuesday (Nov 10) at the age of 85, his wife said in a statement to Hollywood trade publication Variety.Keach died in Poland "after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure", his wife, actress Malgosia Tomassi, said in the statement.“Stacy was not only a legendary actor, admired and loved by audiences the world over, but also my beloved husband, my companion and the heart of our family,” Tomassi added.Keach stood out in dozens of starring and character actor parts on television and in films in roles as diverse as Barabbas in the television miniseries Jesus Of Nazareth and Richard Nixon in the play Frost/Nixon. He also had a busy stage career, often starring in Shakespearean works such as King Lear and Hamlet. His performance as the latter in 1972 inspired a New York Times critic to label Keach "the finest American classic actor since John Barrymore". FILE PHOTO: 71st Cannes Film Festival - Photocall for the film Gotti - Cannes, France, May 15, 2018. Cast member Stacy Keach. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau/File Photo Keach's most prominent role was Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective, clad in a fedora and trench coat, in television adaptations of the works of suspense writer Mickey Spillane. The New Mike Hammer ran from the mid to late 1980s, and Keach revived the character in the Mike Hammer, Private Eye series from 1997 to 1998. He also played Hammer in four made-for-television movies and narrated audio versions of Spillane's books."I have been and always shall be Mike Hammer," Keach wrote in his 2013 autobiography, All In All: An Actor's Life On And Off The Stage.He added: "Certain roles stick to you, and I'm happy that Hammer is mine."The first Hammer series was interrupted when Keach went to prison for six months in England in 1985 after more than 30 grams of cocaine was found in his possessions at London's Heathrow Airport. In his book, he said he had been addicted, and in 2013 Keach told Fox News that getting caught "saved my life, actually".Keach also had a history with Hemingway, the complex Nobel Prize-winning author and adventurer. His portrayal of the writer in Hemingway in the 1988 television miniseries earned him a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination. Keach was born Jun 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in Southern California. As a child, he underwent several surgeries for a cleft lip and cleft palate."Only when I was maligned and teased by kids did it bother me," Keach told Fox News. "I became an overachiever as a result of that. I had to excel in sports to make up for that. It was a motor. It gave me an incentive to do better." For some roles, the scar on his lip was concealed by a moustache, but in a 2016 interview with the Cleft Palate Foundation, Keach said he preferred to let it show when he was in a tough-guy role, such as a mobster, or playing a vulnerable character.Keach's father, Stacy Sr, was a director and actor who worked steadily in television from the 1950s through the '80s. His brother James Keach was also an actor.Keach graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and also studied at the Yale School of Drama and was a Fulbright Scholar at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.In the foreword of All In All, actor Alec Baldwin described Keach as "a miraculous hybrid of the hyper-masculinity of a Brando or Robert Mitchum and the classical training of Richard Burton or Kevin Kline".Keach's movie work included John Huston's Fat City, The New Centurions, The Life And Times Of Judge Roy Bean, American History X, The Long Riders with his brother, That Championship Season, and the Cheech and Chong comedies Up In Smoke and Nice Dreams.His regular television roles included Titus, Prison Break and Two And A Half Men. On Broadway, he starred in Other Desert Cities in 2011 to 2012, The Kentucky Cycle and Solitary Confinement in the 1990s and Deathtrap in the 1970s.Keach suffered an apparent heart attack on stage in May 2017 on opening night of Pamplona, a one-man play about Hemingway in his later years, which forced the cancellation of the show's run. He also suffered a mild stroke in 2009 during a run of Frost/Nixon but returned to the stage 10 days later. Keach is survived by Tomassi, a Polish-born actress who appeared with him in various Hammer shows. He was married three times previously and had a years-long relationship with singer Judy Collins in the 1970s.