Stacy Keach, who brought Mickey Spillane’s private detective Mike Hammer to television and spent decades moving between Shakespeare, Hollywood films and network dramas, died Tuesday at his home in Magdalenka, Poland. He was 85. His wife, the actor Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement reported by The AP that he had been battling a serious heart condition and heart failure.

Keach was already a Tony nominee and had starred for director John Huston by the time he took on Hammer. The detective became his most recognizable part, but the two performances that earned him Golden Globe nominations could hardly have asked for more different things: one was a character audiences expected to recognize each week; the other was a real man, Ernest Hemingway, whom Keach would return to decades later in a play.

The detective audiences knew

On CBS, Keach played Spillane’s fictional investigator as a hard-boiled private eye. The awards record lists a 1985 nomination for Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. As Reuters reported, Keach came back to the character in Mike Hammer, Private Eye, which ran from 1997 to 1998. He also played Hammer in four television movies and narrated audio editions of Spillane’s books.

The first Hammer run was interrupted after Keach was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in 1984 for trying to bring cocaine into Britain. He spent six months in an English prison. After his release, he worked with Teri Garr on the CBS movie Intimate Strangers, then returned as the detective in a television film. According to AP reporting, CBS put the series back on its schedule for the 1986–87 season. Keach also met his future wife through the Hammer production, in which she appeared.

Keach later returned to the subject of prison from the other side of the bars. In Prison Break, he played a warden. He said he drew on the man who had run the English prison where he served his sentence, recalling a warden who wanted inmates to have a chance at rehabilitation. The role was one of several later recurring television jobs, alongside the sitcom Titus and an archbishop on the police drama Blue Bloods.

From Edmund to King Lear

Keach grew up in Southern California and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Yale School of Drama. He also studied in London as a Fulbright scholar. In 1964, early in his career, he played several parts in a Hamlet production with Julie Harris at New York’s Public Theater, the AP reported. That stage work preceded the television career that made him recognizable to a much larger audience.

The Broadway League records two productions that show how quickly he moved between kinds of work. In the 1968 King Lear, he played Edmund opposite Lee J. Cobb, who had the title role. The following year Keach played Buffalo Bill in Arthur Kopit’s Indians, earning a Tony nomination. In 2006 he took on Lear himself at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. He kept returning to Broadway, including for The Kentucky Cycle in 1993 and Other Desert Cities in 2011.

A boxer trying to come back

In Huston’s 1972 film Fat City, Keach played Billy Tully, an aging boxer in Stockton, California. Jeff Bridges played Ernie Munger, a younger fighter just getting started. As the AFI catalog records, the film is based on Leonard Gardner’s novel. Its two boxers are at different stages of the same precarious trade: Tully is trying to get back into the ring, and Munger has yet to find out what making a living there will cost him.

Huston also cast Keach in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Keach went on to play Frank James opposite his brother James as Jesse in The Long Riders, and took a supporting role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska more than three decades later. Those parts were far removed from Sergeant Stedenko, the police officer he played in Cheech and Chong’s films. The Long Riders and the Cheech and Chong films arrived within a few years of one another.

A second turn as Hemingway

Keach won a Golden Globe in 1989 for the television miniseries Hemingway. Nearly three decades later, he played the writer again in Jim McGrath’s Pamplona, a solo play directed by Robert Falls in Chicago. The project asked Keach to carry a full performance on his own. Its focus was narrower than the miniseries: an older Hemingway struggling to finish a story about rival bullfighters.

The first run ended before it could open. Keach fell ill on opening night in 2017, and the theater canceled the remaining performances. The Goodman Theatre brought Pamplona back in 2018 with Keach again in the role. By then, audiences had known him as Hammer for more than 30 years. His return to Hemingway gave them another chance to see the stage actor whose career had begun long before that television role.