Stacy Keach is looking rather dapper in a pinstriped suit and waistcoat. Admittedly he’s bigger round the girth and his hair is grey but, at 64, what do you expect? His trademark moustache still hides the surgical scar of a cleft lip and palate.
He has loosened his tie and, for a moment, if you cocked a trilby on his head, slung a brown trenchcoat over his shoulders and trimmed a few inches off his waist, you’d be back in the mid-1980s looking at the American TV character that once made him a household name: the swaggering hardboiled misogynist, private eye Mike Hammer.
Keach seems to have disappeared off our screens since his heyday in the 1980s. The truth is that he has always been around — he even won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Ernest Hemingway in 1988 to add to his three Obies and three Vernon Rice Awards — but has never found a role that could supplant Mickey Spillane’s iconic antihero in the public mind. But now he is back on television with his best shot in 20 years, a 22-part drama series from Fox TV in America called Prison Break which is now being launched to a fanfare of publicity over here by Five.
We meet on set in Chicago, an impressive reconstruction of the innards of a prison wing with realistic walkways, steel-barred doors, 8ft by 6ft prison cells and thin-mattressed bunk-beds. Prison Break, you see, is an intricately plotted drama about a man who, believing his brother is innocent of the murder of the US Vice-President’s brother, deliberately gets himself put into prison so that he can break him out of Death Row. It’s a preposterous premise but, with a month to go before the execution, the series taps into the horrors of prison life to create a fair degree of suspense. Preview audiences gave it the highest test score in Fox’s history, and it has proved a huge ratings success.
Keach plays the prison warden, Henry Pope, a role to which he can bring to bear his own experiences of prison life. It’s a period he is surprisingly willing to discuss. It was at the height of playing Mike Hammer that Keach publicly fell from grace. Returning from a trip to Paris in April 1984, he was caught with a private stash of cocaine going through customs at Heathrow. The result, six months in Reading prison. Keach recalls: “It was a tremendous shock and it stopped me cold in my tracks. I was under the impression that I was going to get a slap on the wrist and go back to work. I wasn’t expecting to be sentenced.
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“I can still hear the sounds of the prison. The environment was like being in a submarine, everything echoed, everything had reverberation. So it amplified not only your external expressions, but your inner thoughts bounced back at you.
“The most difficult thing I had to deal with wasn’t the personal humiliation but the pain I caused my family. It was just awful.”
He was put on the hospital wing at first, due to a back injury he’d incurred during a stunt for the Mike Hammer show. “The inmates would all come out in the yard and crouch at the window and peer at me because I was famous. They would say (affects a surprisingly convincing cockney accent) ‘would you like some charrrlie, Stace?’”
He spent time re-evaluating his “own stupidity”, but appreciates what the experience taught him. “Once you have survived an environment like that, you come out a much stronger person because you realise you have to change your priorities. I’d been so preoccupied with me and my career, to the extent that I’d shut out my loved ones.”
But in Prison Break Keach will be on the staff — and the unexpected nice guy in the series. “Wardens are usually portrayed as authoritarian, cold people, but this man is very interesting,” he says. “When we meet him he’s having one of the inmates build a model of the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks for his wife of 40 years.” It’s a part he’s modelled on Reading’s warden, a benevolent yet hard-nosed man who allowed Keach to work in the prison library, delivering papers and writing letters for other inmates.
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The accolades he is already attracting in the role are to some extent a vindication of his unfulfilled early promise. In his younger days he was hailed as a superstar in the making — the next Marlon Brando, America’s Laurence Olivier. He was showered with praise for roles such as Blont, the town drunk, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968), and was superb as Billy Tully, a second-rate prize-fighter in Fat City (1972). In The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), he starred memorably alongside Paul Newman as Bob.
Bad luck has not exactly dogged his career, but the Yale-trained Fulbright scholar never quite realised his potential. Since his jail term he has mostly taken cameos and supporting roles on TV and seen many of his movies go straight to video. But while Keach is first-rate in Prison Break, as is often the case, he is only central to the plot for a while and leaves after episode 21. “Then I go back to sitcoms,” he says with a wry smile.
It remains to be seen whether, after Prison Break, their bars will still be strong enough to hold him.