Stacy Keach Movies
A fine dramatic actor who never quite made it as a movie star and so settled with a highly successful career as a television leading man, Stacy Keach is best known for playing the title character in the television detective drama Mike Hammer (1984-1987). Though born with an irreparable harelip, Keach is a sturdy and handsome fellow who is often cast as policemen or other authority figures.Keach is the son of a British actor and drama coach, Stacy Keach Sr., and was born in Georgia but raised in Los Angeles. While attending the U.C. Berkeley, Keach became interested in drama. An agent told him that his harelip would make it impossible for Keach to get leading roles. Keach disbelieved him and went on to study drama at Yale. He then received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. In New York, he essayed a number of Shakespearean roles and those of other classic plays. He also worked in more contemporary productions such as the off-Broadway McBird!, which won him his first Obie and a Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award. He again won these awards after he played Hamlet at the New York Shakespeare Festival. In 1969, Keach won a Tony nomination for his Broadway debut, portraying Buffalo Bill in Arthur Kopit's Indians. For his performance in The Kentucky Cycle, Keach earned a Drama League Outstanding Artist Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Best Actor, and a Drama Award nomination for Best Actor. Keach made his feature-film debut as an alcoholic wanderer in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968). Keach's movie career took off afterward and he appeared in several major movies in quick succession, including Brewster McCloud (1970) and The New Centurians (1972). In 1971, Keach made an award-winning short film, The Repeatery. Later, he also made a television version of Pirandello's complex Six Characters in Search of an Author. As a movie actor, Keach's heyday ended by the early '80s, after appearing in both American and international productions of widely varying quality; Keach then turned to television.
Mike Hammer was a very successful show, but production abruptly stopped when British customs officers at London's Heathrow Airport found Keach carrying a significant amount of cocaine. He spent several months imprisoned in England, but was released in 1986. Having kicked his drug habit, Keach repaired his damaged career and started showing up regularly in television miniseries such as The Blue and the Gray (1985).
Keach continues his stage work, often narrates documentaries, and occasionally appears in feature films such as Escape From L.A. (1995). Keach is a member of the Los Angeles Classic Theatre Work, the Yale Theater Circle, and the Players Club. In addition, he works on the Artistic Advisory Board for the National Foundation for the Advancement in the Arts, the Artists Committee for the Kennedy Center Honors, and the Helen Hayes Honorary Committee. In the '90s, Keach was named Honorary Chair for the Cleft Palate Foundation and in 1995 won the Celebrity Outreach Award for his charitable work. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1989
When private detective Mike Hammer (Stacy Keach) is blamed for a Las Vegas murder, he sets out to prove his innocence and meets a lovely woman along the way. ~ All Movie Guide
Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Ernest Hemingway (Stacy Keach) begins his family and career in Europe, survives combat and marriages, struggles with a ragingly out of control lifestyle, and returns to Idaho where, at age 61 and with his best writing behind him, takes his life. He leaves behind a legacy of great literature and a great legend. ~ Buzz McClain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stacy Keach, Josephine Chaplin, (more)
Based on a novel by Louis L'Amour, this made-for-HBO western stars Sam Elliott, an enigmatic gunslinger who comes to the aid of a family traveling through the wilderness. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sam Elliott, Tom Conti, (more)
- 1986
The made-for-TV Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer was so named for two reasons. For one, this 1986 production appeared after two previous "Hammer" TV movies and a brief weekly series. For another, star Stacy Keach was returning to American television after a British prison term for possession of narcotics. Keach settles into the Hammer role as though he'd never left, taking on the assignment of protecting the young daughter of a movie star (Lauren Hutton). The child is kidnapped right under Mike's nose, and while trying to retrieve her, Hammer discovers that there's a lot more to the case that either the movie actress or the authorities have told him--including a Deep Dark Secret that reaches back to the jungles of VietNam. As with the Mike Hammer series itself, Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer seems to owe more to Ross ("Lew Archer") McDonald than to Spillane. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1986
In this drama, a nurse, interred in a Vietnamese prison camp for ten years, is finally released and goes home with her Asian son. There she finds difficulty adjusting to society and the fact that her husband has found a new life and a lover to boot. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1985
Stacy Keach narrates this well-mounted Civil War docudrama. Filmed on location, The Last Full Measure recounts the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Scenes of the battleground as it looks today are intercut with vintage engravings. The confrontation itself is re-enacted by Civil War buffs, as Keach reads contemporary eyewitness accounts. The Last Full Measure was assembled for video by Lou Reda Productions. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1984
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer: More Than Murder was first telecast January 26, 1984, two days before the premiere of the Mike Hammer series proper. Stacy Keach stars as Spillane's bare-knuckled, chain-smoking private eye, with Lindsay Bloom costarring as his curvaceous secretary Velda. In More Than Murder, Mike's longtime friendly enemy, police captain Chambers (Don Stroud), is wounded during a drug-bust at a poker game. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Chambers himself was in cahoots with the dope dealers. It's up to Mike Hammer to get his longtime antagonist off the hook. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stacy Keach, Don Stroud, (more)
A French model (Stefanie Powers) poses for an artist (Stacy Keach), and they begin an affair. It doesn't last, however, and the model moves on to a married man (Timothy Dalton), while the artist has an affair with his benefactor (Lee Remick). This TV miniseries is based on a novel by Judith Krantz. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stefanie Powers, Stacy Keach, (more)
- 1983
After a 1981 false-start pilot film featuring Kevin Dobson, a new TV series based on Mickey Spillane's fascistic p.i. Mike Hammer was heralded with the 1983 TV pilot Murder Me, Murder You. This time Stacy Keach steps into Mike Hammer's gumshoes, as Mike is hired to protect grand jury witness Michelle Phillips. It so happens that Hammer and the witness were once lovers, but what Mike doesn't know (until halfway through the film) is that he is the father of Michelle's 19-year-old daughter. When the lovely witness mysteriously drops dead in court, Hammer is compelled to seek out the daughter he has never met--before the bad guys find her first. While the plot convolutions are more in the tradition of Ross MacDonald than Mickey Spillane, Murder Me, Murder You star Stacy Keach may well stand the test of time as the definitive Mike Hammer. He continued the role into a brief TV series, though ex-"Charlie's Angel" Tanya Roberts, cast in Murder Me, Murder You as Mike's curvaceous secretary Velda, would be replaced in the series by Lindsay Bloom. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1983
This animated version of DeBeaumont's classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast throws in a dash of Cinderella. The kind, virtuous, generous Beauty lives in a mansion with her five spoiled-rotten sisters. Of her avaricious siblings, only Beauty can adjust when her father loses all his money and they must live in reduced circumstances. And only Beauty has the courage to sacrifice her future to live with the hideous Beast in order to save her father's life. Produced by Ruby-Spears, this half-hour version of Beauty and the Beast originally aired November 25, 1983, on CBS as a "Kenner Family Classics" Thanksgiving special. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Janet Waldo
This melodrama is the second of a two part story based on a novel by Judith Krantz. In this episode, Daisy, the daughter of a Russian prince and an American movie star, must leave college and begin looking for a job in New York so that she can pay her sister's enormous medical bills. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lindsay Wagner, Paul Michael Glaser, (more)
Adapted from Jason Miller's play which won the Pulitzer Prize, That Championship Season is about a group of men who, after 25 years, get together again for a high-school basketball team reunion. After drinking and chumming, the circle of friends soon find long-hidden anger and resentment resurfacing which become muddled with their current mid-life problems. Soon their long-time friendships are collapsing before them. Performers in this drama include Martin Sheen, Paul Sorvino, Robert Mitchum, Bruce Dern and Stacy Keach. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stacy Keach, Robert Mitchum, (more)
Originally networkcast in three installments, the 8-hour Blue and the Gray is a sprawling adaptation of a story concept by Civil War historian Bruce Catton. The drama begins in 1859, with young war correspondent-to-be John Hammond meeting future Union officer Stacy Keach at the trial of abolitionist John Brown (Sterling Hayden). They are reunited two years later during the presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln (Gregory Peck) and are eyewitnesses at the battle of Bull Run. Keach marries Julia Duffy in 1862, while Virginia-born Hammond writes his dispatches from the Deep South. A subplot concerning a family torn by North/South loyalties is resolved just before Appomattox. The Blue and the Gray was first telecast November 14, 16 and 17, 1982. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1981
- PG
- Add Saturday the 14th to Queue
In this early '80s send-up of venerable horror clichés, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss star as John and Mary, an ordinary couple who inherit a mysterious house from a deceased uncle. Along with kids Debbie (Kari Michaelsen) and Billy (Kevin Brando), they move into the musty mansion, unaware that vampire Waldemar (Jeffrey Tambor) and his wife are desperately seeking an ancient book housed within its walls. Soon, Billy finds the book and learns that opening it releases an assortment of scary creatures. John and Mary, however, refuse to believe Billy's tall tales, not even after Mary ends up with puncture marks in her neck and an aversion to normal food. Soon, a mer-man is stalking Debbie in the bathtub, relatives are disappearing and monsters have taken over the house. Help arrives in the form of the wise Van Helsing (Severn Darden) -- or does it? Saturday the 14th provided the directorial debut for veteran horror screenwriter Howard R. Cohen, who would return to the same territory with 1988's Saturday the 14th Strikes Back. Benjamin, who is married to Prentiss in real life, also appeared in the horror satire Love at First Bite. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, (more)
Pia Zadora stars in an over-cooked melodramatic adaptation of the 1946 James M. Cain novel that is every bit as smutty and sleazy as Zadora's vampish character of Kady. The location of the novel has been switched from Appalachia to the barren lands of Arizona and Nevada in 1937. Stacy Keach plays Jess Tyler, a desert hermit who has spent years guarding an abandoned silver mine. Suddenly, Jesse is confronted by his very grown-up and sexy daughter, who, when she was a baby, had been taken away from him by his wife, Belle (Lois Nettleton). Kady, it so happens, hasn't come home for a family reunion -- she has just been dumped by a rich young man who is the father of her illegitimate child and whose family owns the very silver mine that Jess is guarding. Kady hopes to use her feminine wiles to seduce Jess and reopen the mine and extract the money from the earth that she feels is due her from the family. As if his seductive daughter walking around bare-breasted in front of him isn't enough, Jess must also deal with the sudden return of his older daughter, Janey (Ann Dane), who appears with Kady's son; Belle, who comes back to Jess dying of tuberculosis; and Moke Blue (James Franciscus), the man who stole Belle away from Jess years ago. Also squeezing his way into Jess's shack is Wash Gillespie (Edward Albert), the father of Kady's child, who now wants to marry her. Butterfly also features Orson Welles as Judge Rauch. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stacy Keach, Pia Zadora, (more)
- 1981
- R
- Add Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams to QueueAdd Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams to top of Queue
Here, the dope-smoking duo are working on an ice-cream truck, and their specially treated confections are more than just a hit for the kids. Nice Dreams is the third in the series. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong, (more)
Hollywood's Stacy Keach stars in Australia's Road Games. Keach is a truck driver who takes the law in his own hands to capture a serial killer. When the police fail to nab the murderer of hitchhikers, Keach takes to the road, conducting his own search. En route, he picks up hitcher Jamie Lee Curtis--and it is her presence that brings the killer out of hiding and into the bloody finale. Director Richard Franklin's fondness for Hitchcock, which would come to full fruition in Psycho II (1982), is very much in evidence throughout Road Games. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stacy Keach, Jamie Lee Curtis, (more)
The hook in Walter Hill's mythic retelling of the James-Younger outlaw legend is in the casting; the James, Younger, Miller, and Ford Brothers are played by a string of acting brothers, the Keachs, the Carradines, the Quaids and the Guests. The film begins as outlaws are robbing a bank. After the robbery, Ed Miller (Dennis Quaid) finds himself kicked out of the gang for needlessly killing a man during the robbery. Jesse James (James Keach) hands over Ed's share of the money and tells him to leave, a feeling held mutually by Ed's brother Clell (Randy Quaid). After the killing the gang decides to split up for awhile. The James boys return to their wives and farms, while Cole Younger (David Carradine) travels to Texas with his prostitute girlfriend Belle Starr (Pamela Reed). After the brief respite, the gang reunites to rob a well-stocked bank in Northfield, Minnesota. The robbery turns out disastrously, with most of the gang either wounded or dying. The James boys are the only ones not seriously hurt, and they leave the rest of the gang behind, escaping while they can. After the James boys leave, the remnants of the gang are captured. But trailing the Jameses is a relentless posse. Frank and Jesse manage to keep one step ahead until the Ford brothers (Christopher Guest and Nicholas Guest) make a deal with the Pinkerton detectives trailing the outlaws. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David Carradine, Keith Carradine, (more)
- 198z
Re-enactment of the American Civil War battle Co-narrated by Bruce Catton. ~ All Movie Guide
- 1980
Portrait of a Rebel: The Remarkable Mrs. Sanger was written by Blanche Hanalis, a specialist in turning out quality teleplays with a feminist slant. Bonnie Franklin stars as pioneering birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, who in the early part of the 20th century conducted a 25-year battle to have her views legitimized by the puritanical, male-dominated medical establishment. The film covers the years 1912 through 1917, starting with Sanger's work as a New York City public health nurse. Appalled by the deaths brought about by self-induced abortions, Sanger campaigns to enlighten uneducated "lower-class" women in the proper methods of birth control, eventually opening her own clinic. Her efforts are rewarded with public scorn, attacks from various censorship advocates (her informational pamphlets are deemed "pornographic") and frequent jail terms. In order to spice up an already fascinating story, the film places undue emphasis on the brief romance between Ms. Sanger and British sexual-liberation guru Havelock Ellis (Richard Johnson). Portrait of A Rebel might make a piquant double feature with the 1995 cable-TV Margaret Sanger biopic, which starred Dana Delany. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1980
The 2-part TV movie Rumor of War was based on the 1977 memoirs of Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo. Brad Davis stars as Caputo, who during the mid-1960s was a Marine lieutenant. In battle after battle, Caputo performs his duties admirably, even when questioning the wisdom of America's Vietnam involvement. As both the war and the body count escalate, Caputo suffers a nervous breakdown. A Rumor of War bears an inevitable resemblance to the much-earlier antiwar epic All Quiet on the Western Front, right down to the presence of a father-figure combat sergeant (Brian Dennehy). Its few cliches aside, the film is a powerful indictment of the brutalization and depersonalization of America's Vietnam forces. A Rumor of War premiered on September 24 and 25, 1980. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1979
The eponymous young comic is Richard Lewis, Mr. Jewish Angst himself. Lewis agonizes over moving from his native New York to Los Angeles. No matter how successful he becomes, he is never satisfied. Fortunately, he is able to channel his inner demons into his morbidly hilarious nightclub act. Cowritten by Lewis and Bennett Trainer, Diary of a Young Comic was directed by Gary Weis, whose short films were once a mainstay of TV's Saturday Night Live. In fact, Young Comic was first offered to the world as a one-shot replacement for SNL in 1979. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1979
Problems and issues in all branches of science are considered in this three-hour documentary by director Michael Jackson. Filmed in more than a hundred locations and with a cast of over two hundred scientists, the documentary is kept under control by dividing it into nine different subtitled segments that each handle a separate subject. These include themes like "adaptation" and "investigation," as well as "prediction," that are sure to be of interest as the scientists discuss their methodology as well as results. In fact, the scientists themselves are entertaining. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, proved a workmanlike producer/director for 1979's The Ninth Configuration. Army psychiatrist Col. Kane (Stacy Keach) (teetering on the sanity brink himself) tries to minister to the patients in a military mental hospital. The fact that the hospital is located in a brooding old castle is hardly conducive to speedy recoveries. Nor does the mid-film barroom brawl indicate that Kane's approach to mental health is all that workable. Blatty adapted the screenplay for The Ninth Configuration from his own novel Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane (which also served as the film's title during one of its many releases). It is hard to tell if what you're going to see is the "director's cut," since there are several versions of this film, running anywhere from 99 to 140 minutes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson, (more)
- 1978
This drama examines the tensions felt between French and English speaking Canadians after WW I as it tells the story of a town squire interested in promoting industry in his village. Unfortunately, his son betrays him and with the help of another, he reveals his father's true, antireligious motives. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean-Pierre Aumont, Stacy Keach, (more)
