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.