Stacy Keach
Stacy Keach was born on June 2, 1941 in Savanna, Georgia, the son of Mary Cain (née Peckham), an actress, and Walter Stacy Keach, a theatre director, drama teacher, and actor. His brother James Keach is an actor and television director. Keach graduated from Van Nuys High School in June 1959, then earned two BA degrees at the University of California, Berkeley (1963), one in English, the other in Dramatic Art. He earned an M.F.A. at the Yale School of Drama and was a Fulbright Scholar at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Keach was born with a cleft lip and a partial cleft of the hard palate and underwent numerous operations as a child. Throughout his adult life he has often worn a moustache to hide the scars. He is now the honorary chairman of the Cleft Palate Foundation, and advocates for insurance coverage for such surgeries. In the 1971 film Doc, Keach played the title character, John “Doc” Holiday, who was born with a cleft palate in real life.
In 1984, London police arrested Keach at Heathrow Airport for carrying cocaine. Keach pleaded guilty, and served a 9 month sentence at Reading Prison.
He has been married four times: to Kathryn Baker in 1964, to Marilyn Aiken in 1975, to Jill Donahue in 1981, and to Malgosia Tomassi around 1986. He has two children from his third marriage. He was also romantically linked to singer Judy Collins in the early 1970s.
He had a mild stroke in March 2009 but is expected to make a full recovery.
