Stacy Keach (1941-2026)

[Thornycroft]

Stacy Keach

[domino harvey]

Damn I was recently watching a video about Titus and thought how great he was on that show, such an atypical sitcom character and perf. Did he and Powers Booth and Richard Boone ever star together as guys I think might actually harm me

[beamish14]

Stacy Keach was gifted with an incredible range, but I especially loved him in westerns like Frank Perry and Pete Hamill’s criminally underrated, very dour western Doc. He lived a really remarkable life

He credited Titus with basically saving his career and his life when I saw him at a Q&A after The Ninth Configuration

[tolbs1010]

Hilarious in Brewster McCloud and Up In Smoke. He kind of steals the latter. Conversely, every time I watch Fat City I feel that his performance doesn’t quite ‘get there’ to catapult the movie into greatness. Loved his presence on screen in general, though. A life well-lived.

[Never Cursed]

The movie's all over the place, but it's fitting that his last film role was as Clooney's big-personality dad (an obvious borrowing from La Dolce Vita) in Jay Kelly. Felt like a celebration and a victory lap for Keach in a film that already is the same for Clooney

[colinr0380]

Horror film wise, Keach also turns up in the John Carpenter directed "Hair" segment of the Body Bags anthology film, and from there appears as the Lee Van Cleef equivalent character in Escape From L.A.. And appears in 2016 Stephen King adaptation Cell.

The big one of course is The Ninth Configuration, which itself might be a development from Keach's role in the original 1976 TV movie version of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.

And he is also in one of the Italian cannibal film cycle, with Ursula Andress in Sergio Martino's Mountain/Slave/Prisoner of the Cannibal God

And Criterion-wise, he turns up on their edition of The Killers, doing a reading of the original Ernest Hemingway short story.

[JamesF]

Also quite extraordinary as an alcoholic British (!) ex-cop in Michael Apted’s The Squeeze.

[Finch]

Seconding mentions of Keach in Doc and The Ninth Configuration, and he was wonderful too in Fat City, Road Games and The last Centurions.

[GaryC]

I'd add The Long Riders, of which he was one of the producers, and played Frank James opposite his brother James as Jesse, and three other sets of acting brothers.

Also End of the Road, which was his second cinema film and first lead role. I last watched that two years ago when John Barth died (it's the only screen adaptation of any of his novels) and with Keach gone there are few if any of the principal cast and crew left now.

[Orlac]

He was the voice of The Phantasm in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (probably the best Batman movie ever) with the actual identity of the villain being spoilt by the toy!

[beamish14]

I'd add The Long Riders, of which he was one of the producers, and played Frank James opposite his brother James as Jesse, and three other sets of acting brothers.

and co-wrote it as well. A really fine movie that starts deep in the middle of the action and doesn’t let up

[hearthesilence]

Friends and admirers of Stacy Keach, this is for you. In 2024, the Yale Film Archive completed digital restoration of SUPPOSE (1964), a student film made by Paul Preuss when he was an undergraduate at Yale. On the first day of an acting class with instructor Stella Adler, Preuss met fellow student Stacy Keach, who was in the School of Drama at the time. Preuss would later cast Keach as Death in his adaptation of the poem "suppose" by e e cummings. The performance is Keach's earliest known film credit.

Upon its completion in 1964, the film typically screened with live narration of cummings’ poem, alongside the recording of the composed score that is on the soundtrack of the print. In order to complete this restoration project and include the poetic narration again, we came up with the idea of hiring Stacy Keach himself to record a reading of the poem, bringing this film full-circle, 60 years after it was made.

Preuss reached out to him through a mutual friend, and Keach, then 83, recorded the narration in his home studio.

The only existing film element, a composite reversal positive donated by Preuss, was scanned and digitally cleaned by Colorlab, with audio restoration and mixing of the original score and new narration by Audio Mechanics.

See SUPPOSE here: bit.ly/yalesuppose