Stacy Keach has died at the age of 85. He died on Tuesday 10 November at his family home in Magdalenka, Poland, after what his wife, Małgosia Tomassi Keach, called a long and difficult battle with heart failure. The obituaries have been full of Mike Hammer’s trench coat and John Huston’s Fat City, and rightly so. But Keach also spent five decades turning up in science fiction, horror and comic-book projects, usually as the most interesting man in the room and often as the most alarming one. So here is the genre side of the ledger.
He was born in Savannah, Georgia, on 2 June 1941, the son of the actor and producer Stacy Keach Sr. He came to London as a Fulbright scholar at LAMDA before making his name on the American stage as a serious classical actor: Hamlet at the Public Theater in 1964, and decades later King Lear at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. British audiences saw him at the National Theatre in Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie in 1980 and in the West End in Art in 1998. A less happy British chapter came in 1984, when he served six months in Reading Prison after being caught with cocaine at Heathrow. He talked about it frankly for the rest of his life.
The genre work starts early and strange. In Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970), the one about a boy who wants to fly, he’s the elderly Abraham Wright, buried under ageing make-up. In William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration (1980) he’s Colonel Kane, a psychiatrist sent to a castle full of shell-shocked soldiers, a cult film if ever there was one. Richard Franklin’s Australian thriller Road Games (1981) cast him as Patrick Quid, a trucker hunting a serial killer across the Nullarbor with Jamie Lee Curtis as his passenger. In Mark L. Lester’s Class of 1999 (1990) he’s Dr Bob Forest, the man who thinks the answer to unruly teenagers is to staff a school with combat androids. That was presumably never going to end well.
Then came John Carpenter. In the 1993 horror anthology Body Bags, Keach starred in the segment “Hair” as Richard Coberts, a man so desperate about his receding hairline that he accepts a miracle cure. Anyone who has seen it will never look at a hair-restoration advert the same way again. Three years later Carpenter gave him Commander Malloy, the man who sends Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken into the ruins of Escape from L.A. (1996). He later turned up as the crime boss Wallenquist in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014), and as a mad scientist in Bruce Campbell’s Man with the Screaming Brain (2005).
For many of us, though, his genre high point is a voice. In Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), the animated film that is still the best Batman feature in a lot of fans’ estimation, Keach plays Carl Beaumont. He is the father of Bruce Wayne’s lost love Andrea, a businessman who borrowed from exactly the wrong people. He is also credited with voicing the Phantasm, which was a sly bit of misdirection in a mystery whose answer lies elsewhere. Keach gives Beaumont a weary, cornered decency that makes the tragedy work. He returned to the DC animated world in Batman Beyond‘s “Lost Soul” in 1999, and he later voiced the old Corsair Skipper in Disney’s Planes films and narrated episodes of Nova.
Add Sergeant Stedenko, the hopeless narcotics officer forever one step behind Cheech and Chong in Up in Smoke (1978). Add Titus, Warden Pope in Prison Break, and well over 200 screen credits. You end up with an actor who could play Lear on Tuesday and a man fleeing his own hair on Wednesday, and took both seriously. That is rarer than it should be. He is survived by his wife, Małgosia, and his family.
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