Retaking the lead

Anyone opening the door to Stacy Keach’s dressing room at the Mark Taper Forum can count on being whacked in the face with the sweet smell of success -- sweet enough to be cloying, actually. For several days after the opening night of “Ten Unknowns,” his chamber was doused in the heavy perfume of congratulatory bouquets.

“Dying lilies,” Keach says with a laugh.

In his windowless cavity backstage, Keach seems very much at home. Indeed, the veteran actor would happily forgo lavish movie studio lunch spreads for theater vending machines if he didn’t have to worry about that bugaboo of fatherhood -- cold cash.

And the regard is mutual. Keach’s formidable performance in Jon Robin Baitz’s play as an aging, embittered artist who has suffered the art world’s fickleness has won him plaudits from audiences and critics. Writing in The Times, Sean Mitchell marveled at Keach’s complex portrayal: “How many actors can manage such thunder and such sweet pain? He’s been away from the Los Angeles stage too long.”

Director Robert Egan said Keach topped his list for the Taper production, the play’s third after runs in New York and Boston with Donald Sutherland and Ron Rifkin. “I’ve been a major admirer of Stacy’s for a long time,” says Egan, the Taper’s outgoing producing director. “He’s got great depth as an actor and great range. He’s capable of being very light and also being very brutish, and the part demands both. He’s a big visceral presence.”

Egan convinced Baitz that Keach was right for the role, which the playwright had initially written for Jason Robards. Baitz tailored the part for Keach in his rewrite for this production.

“Stacy seems to have access to tremendous pain, a tremendous sense of bruising, having been bruised and pummeled,” Baitz says. “Further to that, there is a vernacular that I employ and some actors understand it quickly and are able to glide along. It has to do with language and cadence. Stacy, I think, understood it. He’s a combination of a seriously curious man and a man who has a great deal of physical stamina as well.”

Far from being a pampered celebrity, Keach leaves plenty of air in the room for others. He’s deferential, candid and thoughtful, more interested in the ideas forming the ballast for his work than he is in the spotlight. He’s tidily dressed in a starched, striped shirt with an open collar and tawny pants, and he wears his facial imperfections as tools of his trade, the rough skin and the cleft-palate scar above his lip that he shrouds in a mustache (but refused to fix when handlers were pressing him to court leading-man roles).

Keach still likes to quote the idealistic slogan of his alma mater, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, even though abiding by it produced mixed results for his career. “We used to be very proud of the fact that you could say that RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] created stars, which we saw as a very sort of derogatory term, and that LAMDA created actors. If fame came, fine. I never pursued fame, and I think as a result, when it happened to me, I didn’t know how to deal with it.”

If Keach has always been ambivalent about fame, fame has been ambivalent about him. His early pursuit of acting challenges doing Shakespeare in Oregon and film cameos as nasty lechers and crazed albinos did nothing to burnish his image as a romantic leading man.

“Producers and agents said, ‘You’re ruining your career by doing those parts,’ ” Keach says of his forays into the bizarre, “and I couldn’t understand it until the phone stopped ringing, and I began to realize that if you’re a leading actor, that means you can’t do a cameo in a movie or people will think you’re desperate to work to the point where you don’t have the discretion to make better choices. But that’s who I’ve always been. I’ve always gone for the character, for the part. If it strikes my fancy, then I want to do it.”

Ultimately, Keach did score leading-man parts in TV series, such as the mid-1980s detective show “Mike Hammer,” his signature noir-ish role, which he reprised during the next two decades. But he never managed to duplicate the career of his role model, Laurence Olivier -- “a great, great classical actor who could also do movies, whatever. That was the closest thing to an image for me.”

Keach strongly identifies with Malcolm Raphelson of “Ten Unknowns” -- which refers to the artist’s debut in an acclaimed group show before the art world moved on to other enthusiasms -- not least because of his own familiarity with the abyss. He has watched other actors such as Gene Hackman walk off with the great, crusty film roles that he might have relished, but he says there’s a big difference between his response to rejection and that of his character.

“This guy has required me to dig a little deeper because Malcolm Raphelson and I differ in one very big respect -- he’d get angry and bitter, and his inability to deal with the situation created behavior defense mechanisms to justify that rejection,” Keach says as he swats at a fly on a futile hunt for a window. “I’m not that way personally. When I get the door slammed in my face, I’m much more of an optimist. I pick myself up and keep moving on because the nature of our business is such that it’s fraught with rejection.”

Keach credits his parents with nurturing his positive attitude, and at 62, he still quotes them, both theater professionals. He says that their support coupled with his friends’ scraped him off the sidewalk after his six-month stint in an English jail for cocaine possession in 1985. Raphelson, he notes, wasn’t so blessed when it came to facing off against his own demons, although the character ultimately learns the value of relationships.

While Raphelson was busy using and abusing people, Keach was worrying about what his mother would think. “We just lost my dad, and my mother was there opening night, and this character has a terrible problem with his mother and doesn’t say nice things about her and I got very self-conscious. But it was my mother, God bless her, who said, ‘Stacy,’ ” he says, launching into her honeyed Southern accent, “ ‘if it’s true for the character, it doesn’t matter what you say up there onstage.’ It gave me tremendous relief.”

As far as it went. He also had to process what the ghost of his actor father, Stacy Keach Sr., might have thought of the play’s coarse language. (The elder Keach died of congestive heart failure at 88 while his son was in rehearsals for “Ten Unknowns.”)

“My dad and I would go to see a play and if there were a lot of expletives and four-letter words that he did not feel were germane to the situation, he would get very upset. So quite honestly, I felt a little self-conscious about that at the beginning, because I realized this play is full of expletives, but they’re expressing an emotional reality which is totally germane to the situation. I lost a couple of days’ rehearsal concerned about something that was foolish.”

Keach, who lives in Malibu with his fourth wife, Polish actress Malgosia Tomassi, and their two children, Shannon, 14, and Karolina, 12, is certainly sunnier than the knotty characters that attract him. His taste for complicated characters and his versatility may have limited his opportunities on screen, but the same qualities have ensured his career longevity as well as his triumphs in the theater.

His portrayal of Ernest Hemingway earned him a Golden Globe in 1989, and his run in the Fox comedy “Titus” in 2000 won him the dubious distinction of being named the Fresno Bee’s television father viewers love to hate -- one reader called Keach “the meanest, sickest, baddest, bummer dude of a dad I have ever seen.”

Keach’s accomplishments as an interpreter of the Bard were honored with a Millennium Recognition Award from Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre, which has also appointed him to its advisory council. He serves on the Kennedy Center’s advisory board, and he’s a charter member of L.A. Theatre Works, which records plays for radio. He continues to be cast in notable plays on great stages, such as Yasmina Reza’s “Art” in London a few years ago.

All of which makes him reflect on his career with satisfaction.

“I’ve spent a career playing great parts,” he says, “as written by Shakespeare or O’Neill or Robbie Baitz, and that gratification doesn’t come from saying, ‘Let’s call an ambulance,’ which I do a lot in movies and television.”