Born to Act : Stage: Stacy Keach brings a lengthy list of credits to San Diego as the star of ‘Solitary Confinement.’

Actor Stacy Keach may be a consummate master of electronic wizardry when he stars in the high-tech, Broadway-bound thriller “Solitary Confinement,” but he had a little trouble in real life when he tried to conduct an interview on his car phone this week.

Rain was splattering on his windshield--making it less than ideal for driving and talking he explained between interruptions from wife and children as he rescheduled the phoner as an in-person interview later in the day.

It’s not the kind of thing that happens to Keach as Richard Jannings, the reclusive, eccentric billionaire who is very much the master of his castle in Rupert Holmes’ new show, opening Sunday at the Spreckels Theatre.

But Keach doesn’t seem to mind.

“This is the best time of my life,” the 50-year-old actor said later in his narrow, modest dressing room. “No question. I love doing this play. It’s hard work, but I love it. And I love being married and having two kids.”

Keach, one of a rare breed of classically trained

American actors, has had a highly eclectic career with significant professional ups and some sobering personal downs.

He has done everything from Shakespeare with the late producer Joseph Papp in New York (once playing Hamlet to James Earl Jones’ Claudius, Colleen Dewhurst’s Gertrude and Sam Waterston’s Laertes) to movies (“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”) to television movies (“Hemingway”) to the television series that brought him international fame, “Mike Hammer.”

But the Mike Hammer fame came with a price tag. Public scrutiny was unrelenting when he was caught with cocaine in London’s Heathrow Airport back in 1984. He served six months in a British prison, and when he returned he testified before a congressional committee, saying, “Freedom from dependency on drugs is one of the most precious freedoms we have, and it must be a loving legacy for our children and their children as well.”

He has been clean ever since, he said. He married his wife, Malgosia Tommassi (whom he met when she had a bit part on his “Mike Hammer” series) six years ago, and together they have a 3 1/2-year-old boy, Shennon, and a 1-year-old girl, Carolina.

He hopes the children will learn from his mistakes.

“You have to love them and teach them . . . . And send them to school in Switzerland,” he said, with a laugh.

Then, seriously: “I’m just very lucky that it all happened 7 1/2 years ago, and that I survived it.”

He continues to work steadily. He last sailed into San Diego as the star of the national touring company of “Sleuth” in 1988, and has great hopes pinned on the success of “Solitary Confinement.”

It has already played to sell-out audiences at the Pasadena Playhouse, where it premiered and closed at the end of December. After it closes here, it is scheduled to go for a six-week run at the Eisenhower Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington beginning Feb. 28, to be followed by a Broadway run April 22 at the Ambassador Theatre.

“It’s been over 10 years since I did a show in New York--the last one being ‘Deathtrap’--and I didn’t originate that role,” he said. “It’s been over 20 years since I originated a role on Broadway.

That was Arthur Kopit’s 1969 “Indians,” for which Keach picked up a Tony nomination for his role as Buffalo Bill.

Creating a part was one of the key attractions of this part for Keach.

His agent tried to interest him in taking over for Jonathan Pryce in the Broadway smash, “Miss Saigon.” He wasn’t interested, he said.

“I did ‘Camelot,’ but then you’re always compared to Richard Burton or Richard Harris. I did “The King and I,’ and I was compared to Yul Brynner. Now, with ‘Solitary Confinement,’ the next guy will be compared to me--and that’s fun.”

Keach was born into a theatrical family. His father, Stacy Keach Sr., was an actor who now works as a producer and director. His mother had acted in college, but gave it up to raise “the three boys”--which is how Keach refers to his brother, himself and his father.

But Keach and his brother, James (now a producer and director), were not encouraged to follow in their father’s footsteps.

“He didn’t want us to be actors,” Keach said. “He told us it’s the most insecure, heartbreaking kind of business. It’s very unpredictable. When I was a freshman at Berkeley, my dad and mom said I should be like Walter Pidgeon. He went to law school and then he became a successful actor.”

Obediently, Keach began his college career with the pre-law major of political science and economics. But he couldn’t get motivated and eventually switched to literature and dramatic arts.

“They said this is a terrible mistake, and you’re going to have to do it on your own.”

He resolved to do just that. He spent his summers performing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and got noticed by a critic for the Saturday Review who brought him to the attention of Joseph Papp.

He later won a scholarship to the Yale Drama School and a Fulbright to study at the London Academy of Dramatic Arts. On his return from England, he taught at Yale. Henry Winkler and James Naughton were two of his students.

His parents eventually came around and endorsed his choice. He and his father even played opposite each other, as father and son in a television movie for CBS called “Mission of the Shark” last year.

It was an emotionally exhilarating experience for both of them, Keach said.

“I loved it. We had the best time. Talk about reality bending. The energy of that scene (we did together) just jumps out at you.”

And then his father, too, let him know how proud he was.

“Now he has said in an interview, ‘With all my experiences with doctors and lawyers, I’m glad he decided to become an actor!’ ”

In this and other ways, Keach has been getting an eerie but affirming sense of life coming full circle in his 50th year.

He was Born in Savannah, Ga., and moved to Pasadena when he was 6 months old and stayed for a few years when his father was performing at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Now, as a new father himself, he has had a chance to bring his children to see him perform at that same Pasadena Playhouse.

“When my son came over to see me rehearse I was sure deja vu. It gave me such a sense of nostalgia.”

San Diego has brought its own unique set of memories, such as the time that he ventured here in 1962 as an undergraduate to audition for Craig Noel and the Old Globe’s summer Shakespeare Festival. He didn’t get cast.

Even politically, things have come around. Noting the excitement generated by Oliver Stone’s “JFK”--a film he much admires--he notes that his first smash acting success was as Lyndon Baines Johnson in “MacBird!,” a take-off on “Macbeth” in which LBJ was implicated as a suspect in the Kennedy assassination.

That was in 1966, when the now gray-haired Keach had to put on a lot of make-up to pass for 55.

Over the years, Keach has become a master at turning adversity to advantage.

He believes Holmes offered him the part of Jannings because of “a very auspicious day” in which Holmes saw him perform in “Deathtrap.”

That was the day the actor playing the lawyer was out, as was his understudy, and Keach had to play opposite the stage manager who read the lawyer’s part from the book.

“I acted as if he was an actor,” Keach recalled. “The audience loved it, and he never forgot it.”

Holmes, a Tony-award winning playwright and composer much acclaimed for his work, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” later told Keach that he was unique as “the only American actor who has done all the major thrillers.”

When Holmes told Keach about his new play, the actor immediately asked to read it. But Holmes wouldn’t send him or anyone else the script--he was afraid the plot’s secrets might leak out.

Instead he offered to perform it for Keach, who jumped at the opportunity.

As soon as Holmes finished, Keach knew he wanted to do it.

“It was fabulous,” he recalled.

Part of the appeal of a good thriller is the elaborate use of illusion. An actor plays with illusion as the normal part of his trade. Using illusion to create the part of a character who likes to play with illusion in a mystery is doubly seductive--and definitely one of the appeals of the thriller genre, he said.

But this show is his favorite of the genre.

“ ‘Solitary Confinement’ is more than a thriller, more than a mystery, it’s a big surprise. It’s a magic show in a way, it’s a whirligig of reality versus unreality, it’s a series of illusions. I think it’s the best part in this medium I’ve ever had.”

He has only one frustration.

He can’t talk about what makes it so fascinating without giving the surprises away. He could not point to the set just outside his dressing room, because that, too, would give things away.

“It’s so frustrating. I’m dying to talk about it. Maybe after it’s run for a while in New York, I can. In the meantime, I want to ride the wave of this play until it hits the beach. I can’t wait to see how the audience here reacts to it.”

Performances of “Solitary Confinement” are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday with 2 p.m. matinees Saturday and Sunday. Through Jan. 26. Tickets are $10-$35 and $19.92 for previews. At the Spreckels Theatre, 121 S . Broadway; 235-9500 or 278-TIXS.