Stacy Keach, one of America’s finest stage actors who became best known for playing scruffy private eye Mike Hammer on TV and whose career was nearly derailed after he was imprisoned in 1984 for trying to smuggle cocaine into Britain, has died aged 85.

Keach died at home in Magdalenka, Poland on Tuesday, “after a long and difficult battle with a serious heart condition and heart failure,” his wife, Malgosia Tomassi Keach, said in a statement. Keach had previously suffered a heart attack onstage in Chicago in 2017.

Though he was considered a pre-eminent interpreter of Shakespeare and a favourite of such legendary directors as John Huston, Keach was indelibly linked with his take on the hard-boiled Hammer, the fictitious TV private detective created by crime novelist Mickey Spillane.

Unwilling to do the same thing over and over, Keach left behind a crazy quilt of roles, playing a stoner cop in the Cheech and Chong movies, King Lear onstage and also narrating World’s Most Amazing Videos on TV.…