Brian Dennehy

Brian Dennehy
Dennehy at the Majestic Theatre in 1988
Brian Dennehy
Born	Brian Manion Dennehy July 9, 1938
Birthplace	Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States
Died	April 15, 2020 New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Actor
Known for	First Blood, Cocoon, Tommy Boy, Death of a Salesman
Education	Columbia University (BA)
Spouse(s)	Judith Scheff (1959–1987); Jennifer Arnott (1988–2020)
Children	5
Awards	Two Tony Awards; Laurence Olivier Award; Golden Globe Award

Brian Manion Dennehy (July 9, 1938 – April 15, 2020) was an American actor whose imposing physical presence and rumbling baritone anchored a career that stretched across nearly six decades of film, television, and stage work. Tall and broad-shouldered, he played sheriffs and soldiers, fathers and tyrants, but it was in the theatre—particularly the long, harrowing dramas of Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Samuel Beckett—that he found the material that critics most closely associated with his name. He was once described as "perhaps the foremost living interpreter" of O'Neill's plays, and he maintained a decades-long relationship with Chicago's Goodman Theatre, where much of that O'Neill work originated. Over his career he received two Tony Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, and a Golden Globe Award, with additional nominations for six Primetime Emmy Awards and a Grammy Award. On screen, he was known to a generation as the antagonist Sheriff Will Teasle in First Blood (1982), the warm patriarch of Cocoon (1985), and the booming, exasperated Big Tom Callahan in Tommy Boy (1995). He died on April 15, 2020, at age 81.

Early Life

Dennehy was born on July 9, 1938, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the eldest of three sons in an Irish American family. His father, Edward Dennehy, worked as an editor for the Associated Press, and his mother, Hannah Manion, was a nurse. He grew up in a household in which his parents' Irish heritage was a constant point of reference; he later spoke at length, in interviews with Irish newspapers, about the importance of his family's emigrant background to his sense of identity and to his eventual gravitation toward Irish playwrights and Irish American characters.

The family relocated from Bridgeport to Long Island, New York, when Dennehy was a child, and he was raised in the New York City suburbs. He attended Chaminade High School, a Catholic boys' school in Mineola, New York, where he played football. The sport, along with his already substantial frame, would shape him for the rest of his life; he later said the discipline of football, and the violence of it, informed the way he carried himself on stage.

By his own account, the household in which he grew up was a verbal, argumentative one, presided over by a father whose journalistic eye and quick temper Dennehy credited with sharpening his own instincts for dialogue and confrontation. He has described the Bridgeport and Long Island years as the formative period in which he absorbed both the cadences of working-class Irish American speech and the long Catholic shadow that he would later draw upon in roles ranging from O'Neill's Hickey to Arthur Miller's Willy Loman.

Education

Dennehy attended Columbia University in New York City on a football scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. While at Columbia he played on the university football team and continued the athletic life that had defined his secondary education. After completing his undergraduate degree, he began graduate study in dramatic arts at Yale University, but did not complete the program.

For many years Dennehy publicly stated that he had served in the United States Marine Corps in combat in Vietnam, a claim that he later acknowledged was untrue. He had enlisted in the Marines but had served stateside and in Okinawa, not in combat. In interviews given later in his life he expressed regret over the embellishment and discussed it as a matter of record.

Career

Early career and breakthrough

Dennehy began acting in earnest in the mid-1960s, working in regional theatre and supplementing his income with a series of manual and service jobs—truck driver, bartender, stockbroker—while he pursued auditions in New York. His first credited film work came in the mid-1970s, and by the end of the decade he was a recognizable presence in supporting roles on American television and in studio features.

A turning point was his performance in the 1979 television film The Jericho Mile, directed by Michael Mann, in which he played a hardened prison inmate opposite Peter Strauss. The film, broadcast on ABC, was widely admired and helped establish Dennehy as a screen actor whose physical bulk could be deployed for menace as well as for warmth.

Film career, 1980s

In 1982, Dennehy appeared as Sheriff Will Teasle in First Blood, the first film in the Rambo series, opposite Sylvester Stallone. His performance as the small-town Washington State sheriff whose harassment of a drifting Vietnam veteran sets the plot in motion remains among his most widely seen screen roles.

He followed First Blood with a steady run of studio work. He played the Moscow homicide detective's American counterpart in Gorky Park (1983), a quietly authoritative Wild West sheriff in Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado (1985), and the leader of a group of alien visitors in Ron Howard's Cocoon (1985), the latter showcasing a tenderness that contrasted with the heavies he often played. In 1986 he starred opposite Bryan Brown in the thriller F/X, and in 1990 he played a corrupt police officer in the Alan J. Pakula adaptation of Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent.

Television and the Gacy role

On television, Dennehy moved easily between leading and supporting parts. In 1992 he played the serial killer John Wayne Gacy in the CBS miniseries To Catch a Killer, a role for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination and which has been the subject of renewed attention in retrospective coverage of true-crime adaptations. The performance, in which Dennehy declined to soften or stylize the character, was singled out by reviewers as among the most disquieting screen portrayals of an American serial killer in the era before such material became a routine subject of streaming drama.

In 2000, he played Willy Loman in a televised version of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman for Showtime, a film that grew out of the 1999 Broadway revival of the play. For the television performance he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film.

Tommy Boy and later film work

In 1995, Dennehy played Big Tom Callahan, the genial Ohio auto-parts magnate whose death sets the plot in motion in the Peter Segal comedy Tommy Boy, opposite Chris Farley and David Spade. Though his screen time was brief, the role brought him to a younger audience that had not encountered his more dramatic work, and the character's warmth toward his hapless son became a touchstone of the film's emotional structure.

The following year, Dennehy appeared as Ted Montague, the patriarch of one of the feuding houses, in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996). He voiced the rat patriarch Django in the Pixar animated feature Ratatouille (2007), and he appeared in Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups (2015).

Stage career

Dennehy's reputation as a stage actor rested, above all, on his work in the American naturalist canon. At Chicago's Goodman Theatre, under the direction of Robert Falls, he played Hickey in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh in a 1990 production that was widely admired; the production transferred and the partnership with Falls became central to the rest of his career.

In 1999, Dennehy played Willy Loman in Falls's Goodman production of Death of a Salesman, which transferred to Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Dennehy received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for the performance. He played the role again in London's West End, for which he received the Laurence Olivier Award.

In 2003, he returned to Broadway as James Tyrone in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night opposite Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard. The production again originated at the Goodman before transferring to New York, and Dennehy won his second Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

Dennehy returned to The Iceman Cometh in a 2012 Goodman production directed by Falls that transferred to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015, with Nathan Lane in the role of Hickey and Dennehy as the disillusioned anarchist Larry Slade. Ben Brantley, reviewing the production for The New York Times, described the company's reading of the play as a defining account of the work for its generation.

Beyond O'Neill and Miller, Dennehy appeared regularly at Canada's Stratford Festival, where he played in works by William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. He also performed extensively in Ireland, including in productions of John B. Keane's The Field, for which he drew on his Irish heritage and which Irish critics received with reservations. In his later years he toured with Mia Farrow in A. R. Gurney's Love Letters, reprising his Broadway role in regional engagements including at Connecticut's Long Wharf Theatre.

Of his stage work in the giants of twentieth-century drama, Dennehy once said: "When you walk with giants, you learn how to take bigger steps."

Personal Life

Dennehy married Judith Scheff in 1959. The couple had three daughters—Elizabeth, Kathleen, and Deirdre—before divorcing in 1987. All three of his daughters from his first marriage went into entertainment work; Elizabeth Dennehy became an actress whose credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Kathleen Dennehy worked as both an actress and a writer.

In 1988, Dennehy married Jennifer Arnott, an Australian-born costume designer, with whom he had two children, Cormac and Sarah. He remained married to Arnott until his death.

Dennehy lived for many years in Connecticut and maintained close ties to Ireland, where he often visited and worked. In an interview with the Irish broadcaster RTÉ in 2009, he discussed his Irish citizenship and his pride in his Irish background.

Dennehy died on April 15, 2020, in New Haven, Connecticut, at age 81. The cause was cardiac arrest following sepsis; the death was not related to the COVID-19 pandemic, his family stated at the time. He was survived by his wife and five children.

Recognition

Dennehy received two Tony Awards for Best Actor in a Play—for Death of a Salesman in 1999 and Long Day's Journey into Night in 2003—and the Laurence Olivier Award for his London performance as Willy Loman. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film for the 2000 Showtime adaptation of Death of a Salesman. He received six Primetime Emmy Award nominations over the course of his career and one Grammy Award nomination.

In 2010, Dennehy was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the Gershwin Theatre in New York, alongside Linda Lavin and director Michael Blakemore. Outside the United States, his work was recognized in Ireland with honors from the Irish Film & Television Academy.

Critics' assessments of Dennehy tended to focus on the rare combination, in a single performer, of physical scale and interior delicacy. Ben Brantley of The New York Times returned repeatedly to Dennehy's stage work over a span of more than two decades, treating his O'Neill performances as a measuring stick for subsequent productions of the same plays. Reviews in the British and Irish press of his West End and Dublin appearances similarly placed him in the lineage of American actors—Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, Jason Robards—whose physical authority allowed them to inhabit the longest and most demanding roles in the modern repertory.

Legacy

Dennehy's career bridged a tradition of American character acting rooted in the studio system of the 1970s and a tradition of regional resident-theatre work that came of age in the same decades. His sustained partnership with Robert Falls and the Goodman Theatre, which produced his Tony-winning revivals of Death of a Salesman and Long Day's Journey into Night and his two productions of The Iceman Cometh, was one of the most durable actor–director relationships in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century American theatre.

His readings of O'Neill, and of the role of Willy Loman, became reference points for subsequent productions. Reviewing the 2015 Brooklyn Academy of Music transfer of The Iceman Cometh, The New York Times treated the Falls–Dennehy interpretation as the definitive contemporary account of the play. His Loman was likewise discussed in retrospectives of the Miller centenary as the performance against which younger actors were measured.

On screen, Dennehy's body of work supplied a recurring archetype of American authority—the cop, the sheriff, the boss, the father—rendered with sufficient psychological detail that the roles avoided cliché. The role of Sheriff Teasle in First Blood is frequently cited in discussions of how the Rambo franchise was launched, and his Big Tom in Tommy Boy has remained a recognizable point of reference in the comedy careers of Chris Farley and David Spade.

His five children, all of whom went into the arts in various capacities, have continued to discuss his legacy in interviews; in coverage following his death and in retrospective features, his daughters Elizabeth and Kathleen have spoken about their father's working methods and his commitment to live performance even at the height of his film career. The American Theater Hall of Fame induction, the Goodman Theatre's continued staging of works he originated, and the regular revival of his most prominent films have together kept his work in steady circulation since his death.