Stacy Keach

Stacy Keach is a theatre actor who has been visiting film and television for six decades. He made his name Off-Broadway in the 1960s and remains one of America's serious Shakespeareans, with four Drama Desk Awards, two Helen Hayes Awards, a Tony nomination for Arthur Kopit's Indians in 1969 and two citations from the Obies. Very little of his screen work has matched what he was doing on stage, and he appears to have made peace with that arrangement earlier than most actors manage.

The screen persona is a bruised authority figure with something rotten underneath, and he found it early. John Huston cast him as a washed-up fighter in Fat City in 1972, still the best thing he has done on film, and he spent the rest of that decade in Westerns and character leads before turning into Sergeant Stedenko for Cheech and Chong. The double life of prestige and paycheque never resolved itself. He is equally at home reciting verse and briefing Snake Plissken in Escape from L.A.

Later he became a specialist in men who run institutions badly. The warden in Prison Break is the most watched of these, a believer in rehabilitation who is being played from the first episode. American History X hands him the recruiter, a soft-spoken man who does more damage than anyone else in the film. And Nebraska, in 2013, let him play a small-town creditor with a grudge, which is Keach at his most economical: a man being pleasant while collecting. The voice has become its own second career, turning up in everything from Planes to Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.