Ninth Configuration Star Stacy Keach Dies At 85

Stacy Keach has died at 85. His wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement that he passed away on Tuesday, November 10, at the family’s home in Magdalenka, Poland, after a long battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure. Deadline was among the first to report the news.

Most people knew him as TV private eye Mike Hammer, as Ken Titus on Titus, as Warden Henry Pope on Prison Break, or as the voice of American Greed. But Keach also spent decades turning up in horror and genre films, bringing a Shakespeare-trained seriousness to everything from cannibal movies to killer hair.

His horror career

One of his earliest genre roles was in Sergio Martino’s 1978 Italian cannibal film Slave of the Cannibal God, where he played Professor Edward Foster opposite Ursula Andress on an expedition into the New Guinea jungle.

In 1980 he starred in The Ninth Configuration, the first film directed by The Exorcist author William Peter Blatty, adapted from his own novel. Keach played Colonel Vincent Kane, a Marine psychiatrist sent to run a castle asylum full of military men who may or may not be faking their madness. Scott Wilson and Exorcist star Jason Miller co-starred. It was shot in Budapest, and Blatty won a Golden Globe for the screenplay. Keach told Fangoria he always thought of it as “the flip side of The Exorcist.” It has a devoted cult following today and is one of his most celebrated performances.

A year later came Roadgames, an Australian thriller from director Richard Franklin, who went on to make Psycho II. Keach played Pat Quid, a chatty truck driver crossing the outback who becomes convinced the man in a green van is a serial killer, with Jamie Lee Curtis along for the ride as a hitchhiker. Scream Factory later brought it back on Blu-ray, and Keach talked about making it in the Ozploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood.

In 1990 he played Dr. Bob Forrest in Mark L. Lester’s Class of 1999, the scientist whose military androids are put to work as teachers at a gang-ridden high school, alongside Malcolm McDowell and Pam Grier.

John Carpenter cast him twice. In Body Bags, the 1993 Showtime anthology Carpenter made with Tobe Hooper, Keach starred in the “Hair” segment as Richard Coberts, a man so obsessed with his thinning hair that he signs up for a miracle treatment from a shady doctor played by David Warner. The new hair turns out to be an alien parasite. Sheena Easton played his girlfriend and Debbie Harry turned up as a nurse. Three years later Carpenter brought him back for Escape from L.A. as Commander Malloy, the man who sends Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken into the island prison Los Angeles has become.

Also in 1993, he voiced both Carl Beaumont and the masked vigilante in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.

The late ’90s and 2000s brought more. He played Dr. Michaels in Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return (1999), appeared in the backwoods horror film Fear Runs Silent (1999) and guest starred on The Outer Limits in 2000. In The Hollow, a 2004 ABC Family Halloween movie with Kevin Zegers and Kaley Cuoco, he played Claus Van Ripper, a cemetery caretaker who helps a descendant of Ichabod Crane take on the Headless Horseman.

In 2005 he played mad scientist Dr. Ivan Ivanov in Man with the Screaming Brain, Bruce Campbell’s first feature as director. Ivanov and his assistant Pavel, played by Ted Raimi, patch part of a Russian cab driver’s brain into Campbell’s head. It was shot in Bulgaria and premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel.

His voice was a big part of his horror legacy too. He narrated the early ’90s series Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories, and for years he hosted the Twilight Zone radio dramas, stepping into the role Rod Serling made famous.

A life on stage and screen

Walter Stacy Keach Jr. was born June 2, 1941, in Savannah, Georgia, to actor parents. He was born with a cleft lip and went through many surgeries as a child, and later served as honorary chairman of the Cleft Palate Foundation. He studied at UC Berkeley and the Yale School of Drama and became one of the country’s top Shakespearean stage actors, playing Hamlet and King Lear and earning a Tony nomination for playing Buffalo Bill in Indians.

On screen he starred in John Huston’s Fat City, played Sgt. Stedenko in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, and won a Golden Globe for playing Ernest Hemingway in the 1988 miniseries Hemingway. Mike Hammer ran on CBS from 1984 to 1987. In 1984 he was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport for cocaine possession and served six months in Reading Prison, and he later spoke about addiction at colleges and rehab centers.

In 2017 he suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago on the opening night of Pamplona, where he was playing Hemingway again, and he returned to the role the following year. He became a Polish citizen in 2015 and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019.

Keach is survived by his wife Malgosia, his children Shannon and Karolina, and his brother, actor and director James Keach.