Stacy Keach died yesterday, Tuesday, November 10, at his home in Magdalenka, Poland, at 85, after a long battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure, as his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, announced. iimiTV reported the death last night in the full story of his six decades on stage and screen.
Keach was television’s Mike Hammer, the Golden Globe winning Hemingway of the 1988 miniseries, and for 16 years the narrator of CNBC’s American Greed. The day since his death has belonged to the people who worked beside him, and their tributes have filled in the man behind the roles.
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Jamie Lee Curtis Leads The Stacy Keach Tributes
The fullest tribute came from Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred opposite Keach in the 1981 Australian thriller Road Games, directed by Richard Franklin. In her Instagram post, shared with her 6.7 million followers over stills from the film, Curtis wrote: “Stacy Keach has died. He was a talented actor and a lovely man. I worked with him in 1981 on a movie in Australia called Road Games. It was a road picture and he was the truck driver, and I, the hitchhiker.”
What she kept from that shoot was practical, and it has stayed with her for 45 years. The production drove from Adelaide to Perth across the Nullarbor Highway, and Curtis remembered that Keach, a veteran of location work, travelled with big steamer trunks filled with rugs, pillows and objects to make a hotel room feel like home. “I learned that from him way back then, and do it to this day,” she wrote, closing with: “Another big loss this year.” Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” plays over the post.
John Carpenter And Bruce Campbell Say Their Farewells
Director John Carpenter, who cast Keach twice, added a short statement shared to Instagram last night, as Bloody Disgusting reported: “Stacy was a tremendous actor, a warm human being, and my friend. I’m really gonna miss him.” Keach starred in the “Hair” segment of Carpenter’s 1993 anthology Body Bags, playing a man whose hair transplant goes wrong, and returned three years later as Commander Malloy in Escape from L.A.
Bruce Campbell, who directed Keach in the 2005 film Man With the Screaming Brain, posted his own farewell on X: “Had a blast directing Stacy on Man With the Screaming Brain back in the day. For a serious actor, he was very funny and charming. Safe travels, sir.” The two posts joined the first tribute, from Lou Diamond Phillips, who played Keach’s son in the 2008 western Lone Rider and called him a consummate actor with the presence of a smoldering volcano.
The Theatre Record Behind The Screen Roles
The stage obituaries settled a part of the record the screen coverage touches lightly. Playbill’s obituary records four Drama Desk Awards, for MacBird!, Indians, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Hamlet, induction into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2015, and his place as a founding member of L.A. Theatre Works, the company he worked with for decades alongside the film career.
Stacy Keach in the title role of Hamlet at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1974, with Avery Schreiber as the Gravedigger. Photo: Tony Barnard, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Playbill also completed the story of Pamplona, his one man show about Ernest Hemingway. The 2017 Goodman Theatre run in Chicago was cancelled after Keach suffered a heart attack on stage on opening night, the collapse reported in last night’s story. What followed it is the detail that defines him: after bypass surgery, he returned in 2018 to complete the commitment and play the role in full.
His Final Role, And What Comes Next
Keach’s final film role now stands as the bitter father of George Clooney’s character in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, released last year. The official Netflix trailer below is the last screen work audiences will get from him, and it closes a filmography that ran from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1968 to a Netflix feature nearly six decades later.
As of the first full day of reporting, no public funeral or memorial arrangements had been announced. Keach is survived by his wife Malgosia, his children Shannon and Karolina, and his brother, the actor and producer James Keach, with whom he starred in The Long Riders. When a memorial is announced, it will be the theatre world, where he started at 23 and where he insisted on finishing what illness interrupted, that claims the first word.
