My Favorite Ways to Kick the Bucket
Stacy Keach Recalls His Own Favorite Death Scenes
Stacy Keach, center, Off Broadway in “MacBird!” (1967), with Cleavon Little, left.
By STACY KEACH
Published: November 27, 2013
“Nobody at Warner’s died like me. It’s the one thing I had a knack for.”
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Carol Rosegg/Shakespeare Theatre Company
Stacy Keach in the lead in “Richard III” (1990) in Washington.
Stacy Keach as Hamlet (with James Earl Jones and Colleen Dewhurst) in Central Park in 1972.
Everett Collection
Stacy Keach is wounded in the 1972 film “The New Centurions” (with Rosalind Cash), only to be shot dead later as well.
Jon Robin Baitz wrote that line for Lyman Wyeth, my character in the play “Other Desert Cities,” but he could have written it for me. Throughout my career, from “Strange Reflections,” the film I made in high school in 1958, to “King Lear,” a half-century later, my life onstage and screen has often ended in an untimely fashion.
As Dr. Bob Forrest in “Class of 1999,” I had my heart pulled out through the chest by a giant robot. I’ve also been electrocuted (“Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return”), stabbed through the eye (“Ooga Booga”) and, as the old gangster movie dialogue goes, shot full of enough lead to start a pencil factory.
When it comes to dying onstage or in the movies, you can’t aim for a moving or powerful moment. You must strive to create something natural, something real, and then let the audience feel those emotions on its own. To do that, you must carefully plot all the moves: The more complicated the death, the longer it takes to rehearse. Getting that right is often what makes for an extraordinary scene.
In Shakespeare, dying often indicates a leading man’s role; I’ve had the privilege of gasping my last as Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth and King Lear. But in the movies, the star gets to ride into the proverbial sunset, and if you meet your demise, it means your name is not on the marquee. Still, it’s better to be dying on screen then sitting at home watching other actors get to do it. And so, macabre though it may be, I now present my top 10 most memorable death scenes, five each from stage and screen (big and small), counting down to my favorites.
Stage
DEATHTRAP (1979)
The most challenging part of Sidney Bruhl’s death by ax was that as the life rushed out of him, his arm jerked, and he flung the telephone handset so it flew up and the cord (remember when phones had cords?) wrapped around a beam above his desk. I worked hard in rehearsal to master the maneuver, and while there was one night where I aimed too low and the phone smashed into the beam and nearly ricocheted into the audience, I think if the phone toss had become an Olympic event I’d have had a shot at a medal.
THE KENTUCKY CYCLE (1993)
I was a villain in the first part of this play, murderous to those around me and bullying at home. My son, a half-Indian whom I treated badly, finally provided my comeuppance, giving me the Agamemnon treatment by stabbing me in the bathtub. It was a fittingly gruesome ending that we made work with a tray of blood capsules stashed in the tub, so that when I arched back, I released a rush of red that flooded the soapy water. It was a heavy moment.
HAMLET (1971 and 1972)
Hamlet’s duel with Laertes needs to be a breathtaking action scene. The catch is that Hamlet ends up dead — the breath literally taken from him, after an athletic sword fight onstage that leaves you panting. I remember during my first run as Hamlet, at the Long Wharf in Connecticut, hearing a boy in the front row saying, “Look, Mommy, he’s still breathing.”
I worked hard after that to be in good enough shape, to learn to conserve my breath and to learn how to “breathe dead” — long, slow inhales through the nose.
My best “Hamlet” death scene was in New York, where I grabbed Laertes’s sword before the fight, and when he pulled it back, the audience saw blood. He has cut my hand, poisoning me. I was flattered two decades later, when I went backstage after Kevin Kline played Hamlet to tell him how wonderful he had been, and he told me that this moment had stayed with him ever since.
MacBIRD! (1967)
I played Lyndon Johnson filtered through Macbeth in my first Off Broadway hit. I listened to hours of Johnson on tape and really nailed his accent and his cadences, aided by all my summers spent in Texas. But I was 25 when the show opened, and while I donned glasses, a false nose and plenty of padding, I wanted people to realize I was not 65, so I played MacBird with great physicality, climaxing with a spectacular fall to the deck for my death. I was enamored of the techniques I’d just learned studying in London, so I devised a straight forward fall, clutching my chest, saying, “My heart, my heart” and going down hard. My elbows still hurt from doing it every night, but it was worth the pain to jolt the audience like that.
RICHARD III (1990)
After Richard’s desperate and angry cry, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” in the final battle, he is totally disarmed. Yet he remains defiant and resourceful. In our production, I had worn leg braces, and in my final moments as Richard, I ripped the metal brace off my leg, using it as the final weapon in his arsenal, forcing Richmond to really earn his victory with that final thrust of his sword.
Screen
THE NEW CENTURIONS (1972)
Getting gunned down as a police officer made for my most realistic and tragic death scene. We filmed on a back staircase in one of the deadlier sections of Los Angeles. I had to do the classic movie reaction in which you clutch the wound and go down in pain. I think what helped it avoid falling into the cliché trap is that my character — who had already been shot and survived — initially reacts as if this were another hard knock to endure, when in reality his life was quickly bleeding out of him.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN (1972)
I made this movie right after “New Centurions.” I didn’t have to do much beyond a forward fall — it was in postproduction that John Huston made it seem as if Paul Newman’s shot had created that giant hole straight through my body. It still makes me laugh every time I see it. Movie magic.
HAIR (1993)
This was my segment of a delightfully gruesome John Carpenter anthology called “Body Bags.” My character gets a hair transplant — something I can attest to being both painful and foolish — but these hairs help aliens put microscopic worms inside me to feed on my brain. It was a devilishly fun way to die on camera, but was actually quite uncomfortable to film, since my excessively hairy face was perpetually itchy, and I couldn’t scratch without ruining the makeup. It was a true exercise in self-discipline.
COLD AS ICE (1978)
My friend Gary Weis cast me in a short film for “Saturday Night Live” that had no dialogue and was in a sense a pre-MTV video set to the tune of Foreigner’s hit single “Cold as Ice.” The film featured a severe-looking blond woman dispassionately dispatching me. She starts with scissors, plunged deep in the center of my back, just beyond the reach of my flailing hands. Then she pops me with a handgun. I flinch and quiver as each bullet punctures my body, almost as if the pain of betrayal hurt more than the bullets themselves. Before she does me in, I ham it up with facial expressions similar to a child who just had his puppy stolen. In the final scene, she blasts a shotgun, from point-blank range, to an area just below the waist.
This time, as I sink to my knees and then pitch forward, I take it in the other direction, a stone-faced, dead-eyed glazed look conveying my disbelief at this coldhearted killer. Dying has never been so fun. Or so funny.
HEMINGWAY (1988)
Without question, this death scene, from a TV mini-series, was the most memorable for me, especially since I had spent months living inside the mind of the titanic personality and American icon. Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter Margaux came to the family home in Ketchum, Idaho, the day before we filmed this scene, but the set — which had letters bearing 1961 postmarks on his desk — felt so real, she could not bring herself to be there for the shoot. It was chilling for me as well, especially as I walked through his steps that day, laying down on his bed, walking into the kitchen to get keys, going out to the garage for the shotgun. Then I came back to the vestibule, closed the door and, finally, with my own nerves completely frayed by this experience, stuck the gun in my mouth.
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