Brian Dennehy, gruff character actor and Tony-winning Broadway star, dies at 81

July 15, 2024

Brian Dennehy, a Tony-winning actor who starred in plays by Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill and portrayed barrel-chested villains, gun-toting lawmen and the occasional charming father figure on-screen, died April 15 in New Haven, Conn. He was 81.

His family announced the death in a statement shared by Mr. Dennehy’s agency, ICM Partners. The statement did not give a precise cause, but his daughter Elizabeth Dennehy said on Twitter that it was not related to the novel coronavirus.

Standing 6-foot-3, Mr. Dennehy had a booming voice and an often intimidating screen presence, playing an overzealous sheriff opposite Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character in “First Blood” (1982), a corrupt Western lawman in the Kevin Kline film “Silverado” (1985) and serial killer John Wayne Gacy in the TV miniseries “To Catch a Killer” (1992).

He also starred as an endearing alien leader in “Cocoon” (1985), a role he modeled after the children’s show host Mr. Rogers, and was featured in comedies such as “Semi-Tough” (1977) with Burt Reynolds, “10” (1979) with Dudley Moore and “Tommy Boy” (1995), as Chris Farley’s exasperated father.

[Hollywood pays tribute to Brian Dennehy after the prolific actor dies at 81]

Mr. Dennehy was celebrated for his work as a character actor in Hollywood and on television, where he earned six Emmy nominations. But he received even greater acclaim for his performances on the stage, starring in revivals of classic plays including O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo.”

“If it doesn’t scare me,” he once said of theatrical roles, “I’m not interested.”

Mr. Dennehy won two Tony Awards for best actor. His first came for playing the central role of Willy Loman in a 1999, 50th-anniversary revival of Miller’s tragedy “Death of a Salesman,” which New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley called the performance of his career.

“What this actor goes for is close to an everyman quality, with a grand emotional expansiveness that matches his monumental physique,” Brantley wrote. “Yet these emotions ring so unerringly true that Mr. Dennehy seems to kidnap you by force, trapping you inside Willy’s psyche.”

“I will always be haunted,” he added, “by the image of Mr. Dennehy’s infantile fragility when he shields his face with his hands, palms outward, before an angry, confrontational [Kevin] Anderson,” who played Willy’s son Biff.

[Arthur Miller, widely regarded as one of the greatest American playwrights, died in 2005]

Mr. Dennehy received an Emmy nomination for a 2000 television adaptation of the production and won his second Tony Award for playing the domineering patriarch James Tyrone in a 2003 revival of O’Neill’s melodrama “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

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Both plays were directed by Mr. Dennehy’s longtime artistic collaborator Robert Falls and landed on Broadway after playing at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where Mr. Dennehy starred in productions that included a 2010 double bill of O’Neill’s “Hughie” and Samuel Beckett’s one-act “Krapp’s Last Tape.” On Broadway, he also appeared in a 2009 revival of O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”

“The words of Eugene O’Neill — they’ve got to be heard,” Mr. Dennehy said at the Tony Awards after winning for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” “They’ve got to be heard and heard and heard. And thank you so much for giving us the chance to enunciate them.”

Brian Manion Dennehy was born in Bridgeport, Conn., on July 9, 1938, and grew up in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island. His father was an Associated Press journalist, his mother a nurse, and by the age of 14, Mr. Dennehy was acting onstage, appearing as the lead in a high school production of “Macbeth.”

He played football and studied history at Columbia University, dropping out to serve in the Marine Corps before returning to receive his degree. “From 1965 to 1974 I served the best possible apprenticeship for an actor,” he told the Times in 1989. “I learned firsthand how a truck driver lives, what a bartender does, how a salesman thinks. I had to make a life inside those jobs, not just pretend.”

Mr. Dennehy studied drama as a graduate student at Yale and, by the late ’70s, he was frequently appearing on television programs, including “Kojak,” “M.A.S.H.,” “Lou Grant” and “Dallas.”

His screen credits also included the movies “Gorky Park” (1983), “F/X” (1986) and director Peter Greenaway’s “The Belly of an Architect” (1987), as a sickly and cerebral architect. He also appeared in the Scott Turow adaptation “Presumed Innocent” (1990), “Romeo + Juliet” (1996) and filmmaker Terrence Malick’s existential drama “Knight of Cups” (2015).

Mr. Dennehy received his last Emmy nomination for the TV movie “Our Fathers” (2005), playing a Catholic priest who opposes the church coverup of sexual abuse and is later forced from the pulpit. He voiced the rat Django in the animated Pixar movie “Ratatouille” (2007) and was recently featured on the NBC crime series “The Blacklist.”

His first marriage, to Judith Scheff, ended in divorce, and in 1988 he married Jennifer Arnott, a costume designer. In addition to his wife, survivors include three daughters from his first marriage, Elizabeth, Kathleen and Deirdre Dennehy; two children from his second, Sarah and Cormac Dennehy; and seven grandchildren.

Mr. Dennehy, who traced his ancestry back to Ireland, acknowledged a personal connection with the brooding, hard-drinking characters he often played on the stage and screen. He was known for holding raucous St. Patrick’s Day parties, once renting a 40-foot mobile home and hiring a driver to take his friends from bar to bar, and boasted to the Times, “At my parties, the sheriff’s department comes three or four times a night.”

He eventually stopped drinking, turning his focus to acting. It had replaced the Catholic faith of his childhood, he said, with another religion: art.

“The most important function that an actor has is — when he does his work right — he holds up a mirror to the audience,” Mr. Dennehy once told USA Today, “and says, ‘This is you in some way. When you walk out of this place tonight, or when you turn the television set off, you will have seen a piece of yourself, and you will know something about yourself that you didn’t know before.’ ”

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