Stacy Keach
- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Stacy Keach has played to grand success a constellation of the classic
and contemporary stage's greatest roles, and he is considered a
pre-eminent American interpreter of Shakespeare. His SRO run as "King
Lear" at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. received
the best reviews any national leader has earned in that town for
decades. Peter Marks of the Washington Post called Mr. Keach's Lear
"magnificent". He recently accepted his third prestigious Helen Hayes
Award for Leading Actor in 2010 for his stellar performance. His next
stage appearance premiering January 13, 2011 at the Lincoln Center in
New York is "Other Desert Cities" by Jon Robin Baitz and teaming him
with Stockard Channing, Linda Lavin and Elizabeth Marvel.
His latest television series,
Lights Out (2011), on the FX
network is a major new mid-season dramatic show, taking him back to the
world of boxing which has been a rich setting for him before, notably
in Huston's Fat City (1972) which
ignited Keach's career as a film star.
Versatility embodies the essence of Stacy Keach's career in film and
television as well as on stage. The range of his roles is remarkable.
His recent performance in Oliver Stone's "W" prompted fellow actor Alec
Baldwin to blog an impromptu review matching Huston's amazement at
Keach's power. Perhaps best known around the world for his portrayal of
the hard-boiled detective, Mike Hammer, Stacy Keach is also well-known
among younger generations for his portrayal of the irascible, hilarious
Dad, Ken Titus, in the Fox sitcom, Titus, and more recently as Warden
Henry Pope in the hit series, Prison Break. Following his triumphant
recent title role performance in King Lear for the prestigious Goodman
Theatre in Chicago, Keach joined the starring cast of John Sayles'
recent film, Honeydripper. In the most recent of his non-stop
activities, he has completed filming Deathmatch for the Spike Channel,
and The Boxer for Zeitsprung Productions in Berlin, Germany.
German audiences will also see him as one of the co-stars in the
multi-million dollar production of
Hindenburg: The Last Flight (2011), scheduled
to air in January, 2011 with worldwide release thereafter. Mr. Keach
co-stars in the new FX series entitled
Lights Out (2011) about a boxing
family, where he plays the Dad-trainer of two boxing sons played by
Holt McCallany and
Pablo Schreiber. The series is also
scheduled to air in January, 2011. Keach returns to the New York stage
at the start of the 2011 in Jon Robin Baitz's new play, "Other Desert
Cities," at the Lincoln Center.
Capping his heralded accomplishment on the live stage of putting his
own stamp on some of the theatre world's most revered and challenging
roles over the past year when he headed the national touring company
cast of "Frost/Nixon," portraying Richard M. Nixon, bringing still
another riveting characterization to the great legit stages of Los
Angeles, Chicago, Boston, the nation's capitol and other major cities.
He won his second Best Actor Helen Hayes Award for his outstanding
performance. His second triumphant portrayal of King Lear in the past
three years, this time for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in the
nation's capital earned reviews heard around the world, with resulting
offers for him to repeat that giant accomplishment in New York, Los
Angeles and even Beijing.
An accomplished pianist and composer, Mr. Keach composed the music for
the film, Imbued (2009), directed by Rob
Nilssen, a celebrated film festival favorite, in which Keach also
starred. He has also completed composing the music for the Mike Hammer
audio radio series, "Encore For Murder", written by Max Collins,
directed by Carl Amari, and produced by Blackstone Audio.
Mr. Keach began his film career in the late 1960's with
_The Heart Is A
Lonely Hunter_,
followed by _The New Centurions_ with
George C. Scott; Doc Holiday with
Faye Dunaway in the film
'Doc' (1971);
an over-the-hill boxer,Billy Tully in
Fat City (1972); directed by
John Huston, and
The Long Riders (1980), which he
co-produced and co-wrote with his brother,
James Keach, directed by
Walter Hill. On the lighter side,
his characterization of Sgt. Stedenko in Cheech and Chong's
Up in Smoke (1978), and the sequel,
Nice Dreams (1981), gave a whole new
generation a taste of Mr. Keach's comedic flair, which he also
demonstrated in Robert Altman's
Brewster McCloud (1970), playing
the oldest living lecherous Wright Brother; and
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)
where he played a crazed albino out to kill
Paul Newman.
Historical roles have always attracted him. In movies he has played
roles ranging from Martin Luther to Frank James. On television he has
been Napoleon, Wilbur Wright, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Barabbas, Sam
Houston, and Ernest Hemingway, for which he won a Golden Globe as Best
Actor in a mini-series and was nominated for an Emmy in the same
category. He played an eccentric painter, Mistral, in the Judith Krantz
classic,
Mistral's Daughter (1984),
a northern spy in the civil war special,
The Blue and the Gray (1982),
more recently as the pirate Benjamin Hornigold in the Hallmark epic
Blackbeard (2006).
As a director, his production of Arthur Miller's
Incident at Vichy (1973)
for PBS was, according to Mr. Miller in his autobiography, Timebends,
"the most expressive production of that play he had seen." He won a
Cine Golden Eagle Award for his work on the dramatic documentary, The
Repeater, in which he starred and also wrote and directed.
But it is perhaps the live theatre where Mr. Keach shines brightest. He
began his professional career with the New York Shakespeare Festival in
1964, doubling as Marcellus and the Player King in a production of
Hamlet directed by Joseph Papp and which featured Julie Harris as
Ophelia. He rose to prominence in 1967 in the Off-Broadway political
satire, MacBird, where the title role was a cross between Lyndon
Johnson and Macbeth and for which he received the first of his three
Obie awards. He played the title roles in Henry 5, Hamlet (which he
played 3 times), Richard 3, Macbeth, and most recently as King Lear in
Robert Falls' modern adaptation at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, which
Charles Isherwood of the NY Times called "terrific" and "a blistering
modern-dress production that brings alive the morally disordered
universe of the play with a ferocity unmatched by any other production
I've seen." Mr. Keach's stage portrayals of Peer Gynt, Falstaff and
Cyrano de Bergerac, and Hamlet caused the New York Times to dub him
"the finest American classical actor since John Barrymore."
Mr. Keach's Broadway credits include his Broadway debut, Indians, where
he played Buffalo Bill and was nominated for a Tony award as Best
Actor. He starred in Ira Levin's Deathtrap, the Pulitzer Prize winning
Kentucky Cycle (for which he won his first Helen Hayes award as Best
Actor), the Rupert Holmes one-man thriller, Solitary Confinement, where
Mr. Keach played no less than six roles, all unbeknownst to the
audience until the end of the play. In the musical theatre, he starred
in the national tour of Barnum, played the King in Camelot for
Pittsburgh's Civic Light Opera, and the King in The King and I, which
he also toured in Japan. He starred in the Jon Robin Baitz play, Ten
Unknowns, at the Mark Taper Forum in 2003. The LA Times said: "And then
there's Keach. What a performance! How many actors can manage such
thunder and such sweet pain. He's been away from the LA stage too long.
Welcome back."
In 2004, he starred as Scrooge in Boston's Trinity Rep musical
production of A Christmas Carol; earlier in 2004, he starred as Phil
Ochsner in Arthur Miller's last play Finishing The Picture, directed by
Robert Falls at the Goodman Theatre.
As a narrator his voice has been heard in countless documentaries; as
the host for the Twilight Zone radio series; numerous books on tape,
including the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. In the year 2000, he
recorded a CD of all of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He recently recorded the
voice of St. Paul for a new audio version of The New Testament:, The
Word of Promise and Job for the Old Testament edition. He is the
narrator on CNBC's new hit show,
American Greed (2007), and
recently narrated the award-winning documentary,
The Pixar Story (2007). He has
also reprised his role as Mike Hammer in the Blackstone audio series,
the most recent being "Encore for Murder". A charter-member of LA
Theatre Works, Mr. Keach recently played the title role in Bertolt
Brecht's Galileo, recorded both for radio and CD. He was seen on CBS's
hit show
Two and a Half Men (2003)
as the gay Dad of Charlie's fiance.
Stacy Keach also believes strongly in 'giving back' and has been the
Honorary Chair for the Cleft Palate Foundation for the past twenty-five
years. He is also the national spokesman for the World Craniofacial
organization. He has served on the Artist's Committee for the Kennedy
Center Honors for two decades, is on the board of directors for Genesis
at the Crossroads, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to bringing
peoples of combatant cultures together through the shared artistic
expressions of the visual and culinary arts, music, dance, and theater.
He also serves on the artistic board for Washington DC's Shakespeare
Theatre National Council, where he was also honored in 2000 with their
prestigious Millennium Award for his contribution to classical theatre.
Some years ago Hollywood honored him with a Celebrity Outreach Award
for his work with charitable organizations.
He has been the recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from Pacific
Pioneer's Broadcasters, the San Diego Film Festival, the Pacific
Palisades Film Festival, and The 2007 Oldenburg Film Festival in
Germany. Later this year, he will be awarded the 2010 Lifetime Award
from the St. Louis Film Festival. In 2008, he received the Mary
Pickford Award for versatility in acting.
Mr. Keach was a Fulbright scholar to the London Academy of Music and
Dramatic Art, attended the University of California at Berkeley and the
Yale Drama School. He has always been a star of the American stage,
especially in Shakespearen roles such as Hamlet, Henry 5, Coriolanus,
Falstaff, Macbeth, Richard 3, and most recently, King Lear.
Of his many accomplishments, Mr. Keach claims that his greatest
accomplishment is his family. He has been married to his beautiful wife
Malgosia for twenty-five years, and they have two wonderful children,
Shannon Keach (1988), and daughter Karolina Keach (1990).
and contemporary stage's greatest roles, and he is considered a
pre-eminent American interpreter of Shakespeare. His SRO run as "King
Lear" at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. received
the best reviews any national leader has earned in that town for
decades. Peter Marks of the Washington Post called Mr. Keach's Lear
"magnificent". He recently accepted his third prestigious Helen Hayes
Award for Leading Actor in 2010 for his stellar performance. His next
stage appearance premiering January 13, 2011 at the Lincoln Center in
New York is "Other Desert Cities" by Jon Robin Baitz and teaming him
with Stockard Channing, Linda Lavin and Elizabeth Marvel.
His latest television series,
Lights Out (2011), on the FX
network is a major new mid-season dramatic show, taking him back to the
world of boxing which has been a rich setting for him before, notably
in Huston's Fat City (1972) which
ignited Keach's career as a film star.
Versatility embodies the essence of Stacy Keach's career in film and
television as well as on stage. The range of his roles is remarkable.
His recent performance in Oliver Stone's "W" prompted fellow actor Alec
Baldwin to blog an impromptu review matching Huston's amazement at
Keach's power. Perhaps best known around the world for his portrayal of
the hard-boiled detective, Mike Hammer, Stacy Keach is also well-known
among younger generations for his portrayal of the irascible, hilarious
Dad, Ken Titus, in the Fox sitcom, Titus, and more recently as Warden
Henry Pope in the hit series, Prison Break. Following his triumphant
recent title role performance in King Lear for the prestigious Goodman
Theatre in Chicago, Keach joined the starring cast of John Sayles'
recent film, Honeydripper. In the most recent of his non-stop
activities, he has completed filming Deathmatch for the Spike Channel,
and The Boxer for Zeitsprung Productions in Berlin, Germany.
German audiences will also see him as one of the co-stars in the
multi-million dollar production of
Hindenburg: The Last Flight (2011), scheduled
to air in January, 2011 with worldwide release thereafter. Mr. Keach
co-stars in the new FX series entitled
Lights Out (2011) about a boxing
family, where he plays the Dad-trainer of two boxing sons played by
Holt McCallany and
Pablo Schreiber. The series is also
scheduled to air in January, 2011. Keach returns to the New York stage
at the start of the 2011 in Jon Robin Baitz's new play, "Other Desert
Cities," at the Lincoln Center.
Capping his heralded accomplishment on the live stage of putting his
own stamp on some of the theatre world's most revered and challenging
roles over the past year when he headed the national touring company
cast of "Frost/Nixon," portraying Richard M. Nixon, bringing still
another riveting characterization to the great legit stages of Los
Angeles, Chicago, Boston, the nation's capitol and other major cities.
He won his second Best Actor Helen Hayes Award for his outstanding
performance. His second triumphant portrayal of King Lear in the past
three years, this time for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in the
nation's capital earned reviews heard around the world, with resulting
offers for him to repeat that giant accomplishment in New York, Los
Angeles and even Beijing.
An accomplished pianist and composer, Mr. Keach composed the music for
the film, Imbued (2009), directed by Rob
Nilssen, a celebrated film festival favorite, in which Keach also
starred. He has also completed composing the music for the Mike Hammer
audio radio series, "Encore For Murder", written by Max Collins,
directed by Carl Amari, and produced by Blackstone Audio.
Mr. Keach began his film career in the late 1960's with
_The Heart Is A
Lonely Hunter_,
followed by _The New Centurions_ with
George C. Scott; Doc Holiday with
Faye Dunaway in the film
'Doc' (1971);
an over-the-hill boxer,Billy Tully in
Fat City (1972); directed by
John Huston, and
The Long Riders (1980), which he
co-produced and co-wrote with his brother,
James Keach, directed by
Walter Hill. On the lighter side,
his characterization of Sgt. Stedenko in Cheech and Chong's
Up in Smoke (1978), and the sequel,
Nice Dreams (1981), gave a whole new
generation a taste of Mr. Keach's comedic flair, which he also
demonstrated in Robert Altman's
Brewster McCloud (1970), playing
the oldest living lecherous Wright Brother; and
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)
where he played a crazed albino out to kill
Paul Newman.
Historical roles have always attracted him. In movies he has played
roles ranging from Martin Luther to Frank James. On television he has
been Napoleon, Wilbur Wright, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Barabbas, Sam
Houston, and Ernest Hemingway, for which he won a Golden Globe as Best
Actor in a mini-series and was nominated for an Emmy in the same
category. He played an eccentric painter, Mistral, in the Judith Krantz
classic,
Mistral's Daughter (1984),
a northern spy in the civil war special,
The Blue and the Gray (1982),
more recently as the pirate Benjamin Hornigold in the Hallmark epic
Blackbeard (2006).
As a director, his production of Arthur Miller's
Incident at Vichy (1973)
for PBS was, according to Mr. Miller in his autobiography, Timebends,
"the most expressive production of that play he had seen." He won a
Cine Golden Eagle Award for his work on the dramatic documentary, The
Repeater, in which he starred and also wrote and directed.
But it is perhaps the live theatre where Mr. Keach shines brightest. He
began his professional career with the New York Shakespeare Festival in
1964, doubling as Marcellus and the Player King in a production of
Hamlet directed by Joseph Papp and which featured Julie Harris as
Ophelia. He rose to prominence in 1967 in the Off-Broadway political
satire, MacBird, where the title role was a cross between Lyndon
Johnson and Macbeth and for which he received the first of his three
Obie awards. He played the title roles in Henry 5, Hamlet (which he
played 3 times), Richard 3, Macbeth, and most recently as King Lear in
Robert Falls' modern adaptation at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, which
Charles Isherwood of the NY Times called "terrific" and "a blistering
modern-dress production that brings alive the morally disordered
universe of the play with a ferocity unmatched by any other production
I've seen." Mr. Keach's stage portrayals of Peer Gynt, Falstaff and
Cyrano de Bergerac, and Hamlet caused the New York Times to dub him
"the finest American classical actor since John Barrymore."
Mr. Keach's Broadway credits include his Broadway debut, Indians, where
he played Buffalo Bill and was nominated for a Tony award as Best
Actor. He starred in Ira Levin's Deathtrap, the Pulitzer Prize winning
Kentucky Cycle (for which he won his first Helen Hayes award as Best
Actor), the Rupert Holmes one-man thriller, Solitary Confinement, where
Mr. Keach played no less than six roles, all unbeknownst to the
audience until the end of the play. In the musical theatre, he starred
in the national tour of Barnum, played the King in Camelot for
Pittsburgh's Civic Light Opera, and the King in The King and I, which
he also toured in Japan. He starred in the Jon Robin Baitz play, Ten
Unknowns, at the Mark Taper Forum in 2003. The LA Times said: "And then
there's Keach. What a performance! How many actors can manage such
thunder and such sweet pain. He's been away from the LA stage too long.
Welcome back."
In 2004, he starred as Scrooge in Boston's Trinity Rep musical
production of A Christmas Carol; earlier in 2004, he starred as Phil
Ochsner in Arthur Miller's last play Finishing The Picture, directed by
Robert Falls at the Goodman Theatre.
As a narrator his voice has been heard in countless documentaries; as
the host for the Twilight Zone radio series; numerous books on tape,
including the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. In the year 2000, he
recorded a CD of all of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He recently recorded the
voice of St. Paul for a new audio version of The New Testament:, The
Word of Promise and Job for the Old Testament edition. He is the
narrator on CNBC's new hit show,
American Greed (2007), and
recently narrated the award-winning documentary,
The Pixar Story (2007). He has
also reprised his role as Mike Hammer in the Blackstone audio series,
the most recent being "Encore for Murder". A charter-member of LA
Theatre Works, Mr. Keach recently played the title role in Bertolt
Brecht's Galileo, recorded both for radio and CD. He was seen on CBS's
hit show
Two and a Half Men (2003)
as the gay Dad of Charlie's fiance.
Stacy Keach also believes strongly in 'giving back' and has been the
Honorary Chair for the Cleft Palate Foundation for the past twenty-five
years. He is also the national spokesman for the World Craniofacial
organization. He has served on the Artist's Committee for the Kennedy
Center Honors for two decades, is on the board of directors for Genesis
at the Crossroads, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to bringing
peoples of combatant cultures together through the shared artistic
expressions of the visual and culinary arts, music, dance, and theater.
He also serves on the artistic board for Washington DC's Shakespeare
Theatre National Council, where he was also honored in 2000 with their
prestigious Millennium Award for his contribution to classical theatre.
Some years ago Hollywood honored him with a Celebrity Outreach Award
for his work with charitable organizations.
He has been the recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from Pacific
Pioneer's Broadcasters, the San Diego Film Festival, the Pacific
Palisades Film Festival, and The 2007 Oldenburg Film Festival in
Germany. Later this year, he will be awarded the 2010 Lifetime Award
from the St. Louis Film Festival. In 2008, he received the Mary
Pickford Award for versatility in acting.
Mr. Keach was a Fulbright scholar to the London Academy of Music and
Dramatic Art, attended the University of California at Berkeley and the
Yale Drama School. He has always been a star of the American stage,
especially in Shakespearen roles such as Hamlet, Henry 5, Coriolanus,
Falstaff, Macbeth, Richard 3, and most recently, King Lear.
Of his many accomplishments, Mr. Keach claims that his greatest
accomplishment is his family. He has been married to his beautiful wife
Malgosia for twenty-five years, and they have two wonderful children,
Shannon Keach (1988), and daughter Karolina Keach (1990).
Star Siblings: Famous Brothers and Sisters
Star Siblings: Famous Brothers and Sisters
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