Stacy Keach played the American truck driver chasing a killer across Australia in Road Games, the colonel put in charge of a castle full of military patients in The Ninth Configuration, and the businessman who buys a hair transplant from an alien doctor in John Carpenter’s Body Bags. Keach died on Tuesday, November 10, at his family home in Magdalenka, Poland. He was 85.
His wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement to Variety that he died after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure. “Stacy was not only a legendary actor, admired and loved by audiences the world over,” she said. “His passing leaves an immeasurable emptiness in our lives.”
Keach was born in Savannah, Georgia, on June 2, 1941, and worked across more than fifty years of stage, film, television and voice work. He won a Golden Globe for the miniseries Hemingway, took a Tony nomination for Indians in 1970, and drew a second Globe nomination as television’s Mike Hammer. Outside the genre he is remembered for Fat City, American History X, Nebraska and his run as Cardinal Kearns on Blue Bloods.
William Peter Blatty Gave Him the Lead
His signature horror credit came in 1980. William Peter Blatty, seven years past The Exorcist, directed his own novel The Ninth Configuration and handed Keach the part of Colonel Vincent Kane, a psychiatrist who arrives at a military asylum carrying a false identity and a buried past. Blatty wrote the film around Billy Cutshaw, the astronaut Regan warns at the party in The Exorcist, played here by Scott Wilson, and filled the ward around them with Jason Miller, his own Father Karras, and Ed Flanders.
Two Films With John Carpenter
John Carpenter hired him twice. In Body Bags, the 1993 Showtime anthology Carpenter made with Tobe Hooper, Keach headlined the “Hair” segment as Richard Coberts, a vain businessman who buys a full head of hair from a doctor who is not human. Carpenter directed that segment himself, as he did “The Gas Station,” leaving Hooper the Mark Hamill eye transplant. Three years later Carpenter cast Keach as Commander Malloy in Escape from L.A.
The Rest of the Horror Résumé
The genre kept calling. He was Professor Edward Foster in the 1978 Italian cannibal picture Slave of the Cannibal God, then Pat Quid in Richard Franklin’s Road Games in 1981, sharing the cab with Jamie Lee Curtis in the thick of her scream queen run. He played Dr. Bob Forest in Class of 1999, Dr. Michaels in Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return, and Charles Ardai in Cell, the 2016 Stephen King adaptation. He also voiced Carl Beaumont in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, and supplied the Phantasm’s distorted voice.
The Voice That Narrated Other People’s Hauntings
For four years in the nineties he was the voice walking viewers through strangers’ ghost stories, hosting Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories from 1992 to 1995. He narrated CNBC’s American Greed for well over a decade and hosted the Twilight Zone radio drama series. His last screen role was in Jay Kelly, released in 2025.
Keach is survived by his wife, Malgosia, and their two children.
