Actor Stacy Keach, who portrayed rugged characters such as fictional detective Mike Hammer and legendary American novelist Ernest Hemingway, has died at the age of 85.

Keach died in Poland “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition ‌and heart failure,” , his wife Malgosia Tomassi told Variety on Tuesday.

“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 said.

In 2025 he had an excellent turn as George Clooney’s bitter father in Jay Kelly.

“My objective was to have as varied a selection of roles as possible. It probably did hurt my career,” he told New York magazine in 2012.

“My choices have had a cost attached to it. But I’ve gotten to play Hamlet, and Richard III, and King Lear, and I would not give that up for anything.”

Keach stood out in dozens of starring and character actor parts on television and in films in roles as diverse as Barabbas (the TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth) and Richard ‌Nixon (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”.

Keach’s most prominent role was Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective, clad in fedora and trenchcoat, 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 1997-98. 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.

“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 had a history with Hemingway, the complex Nobel Prize-winning author and adventurer. His portrayal of Hemingway in the 1988 television miniseries earned him a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination.

Lou Diamond Phillips, who played Keach’s son in the 2008 TV movie Lone Rider, said on X that Keach was a “consummate actor, gracious, giving and incredibly kind even while he had the presence of a smoldering volcano. One of the greats. Proud to have shared some frames with him”.

Keach was born June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia, ⁠and grew up in Southern California. As a child he had 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 over achiever 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 2016, Keach told the Cleft ​Palate Foundation that 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.

Keach suffered a heart attack on stage in 2017 on opening night of Pamplona, a ​one-man play about Hemingway, that forced the cancellation of the show.

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.

-AAP