According to Variety, Dennehy was "perhaps the foremost living interpreter" of playwright Eugene O'Neill's works on stage and screen. He had a decades-long relationship with Chicago's Goodman Theatre where much of his O'Neill work originated.[1] He also regularly played Canada's Stratford Festival, especially in works by William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett.[2] He once gave credit for his award-winning performances to the plays’ authors: "When you walk with giants, you learn how to take bigger steps."[3] Dennehy was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2010.
He entered Columbia University in New York City on a football scholarship in the fall of 1956. He interrupted his college education to spend five years in the U.S. Marines. He was stationed in the U.S., Japan, and Korea. He returned to Columbia in 1960 and graduated in 1965 with a B.A. in history.[12] While acting in regional theater he supported his family by working blue-collar jobs including driving a taxi and bartending. He hated his brief stint as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch in their Manhattan office in the mid-1970s.[13] He later described how working odd hours allowed him to attend matinee theater performances that provided his acting education: "I never went to acting school—I was a truck driver and I used to go see everything I could see—Wednesday afternoons".[14][a] In the 1970s, stage performances in New York led to television and film work.[18]
Dennehy was primarily known as a dramatic actor. His breakthrough role was as the overzealous sheriff Will Teasle in First Blood (1982) opposite Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo.[19]
One of his most well-known roles came in the 1995 Chris Farley-David Spade comedy Tommy Boy as Big Tom Callahan. He also was reunited with his 10 co-star Bo Derek in Tommy Boy, in which she played his wife. The following year, he played Romeo's father in Romeo + Juliet.
Dennehy starred as Clarence Darrow in Alleged, a film based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, the famous court battle over the teaching of evolution in American public schools.[20]
Television
Dennehy's early professional acting career included small guest roles in such 1970s and 1980s series as Kojak, Lou Grant, Dallas, Dynasty, and Hunter. He also appeared in an episode of Miami Vice during the 1987–88 season.
Dennehy had a lead role as fire chief/celebrity dad Leslie "Buddy" Krebs in the short-lived 1982 series Star of the Family. Despite his star power, that show was cancelled after a half-season. He starred in the crime drama Jack Reed TV movies.
Dennehy in 2009
Dennehy was nominated for Emmy Awards six times for his television movies. In 1992, he was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie for his performance as John Wayne Gacy in To Catch a Killer, and he was nominated that same year in a different category, Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie, for The Burden of Proof. Dennehy's other Emmy nominations were for his work in A Killing in a Small Town, Murder in the Heartland (1993) and his work in the Showtime cable TV movie Our Fathers (2005), which was about the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. In 2000, Dennehy was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie for a television presentation for his performance as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman which he had performed on Broadway. While not gaining the actor an Emmy win, the performance did, however, win him a Golden Globe Award. He also appeared as a recurring character in the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me!.
In January 2007, he starred in the episode "Scheherazade" of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as a retired criminal who wants to reconnect with his daughter and admit his crimes before dying of a terminal disease thus eventually clearing a wrongfully imprisoned inmate. In April 2008, Dennehy guest-starred as a Teamster boss in "Sandwich Day", an episode of the TV series 30 Rock. He guest-starred in a 2009 episode of Rules of Engagement as the father of the main character, Jeff.[21]
Dennehy starred as Elizabeth Keen's grandfather on the NBC series The Blacklist since the third season until his death from sepsis. He is replaced by actor Ron Raines during the show's eighth season.
Dennehy also narrated many television programs[22] including the Canadian-Irish docudrama Death or Canada.[23][24]
Theater
Dennehy won two Tony Awards, both times for Best Lead Actor in a Play. His first win was for Death of a Salesman (for which he also won a Laurence Olivier Award for the production's London run), in 1999, and the second was for Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in 2003. Both productions were directed by Robert Falls and were originally produced at the Goodman Theatre company in Chicago, Illinois. His acting in the "Salesman" was called "the performance of Dennehy's career".
In April through June 2012, he played the role of Larry Slade in the Eugene O'Neill play The Iceman Cometh at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago,[31] which he reprised in 2015 when the production, with most of the Goodman Theater production cast, was revived at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn, New York, New York.[32]
Military service
Dennehy enlisted in the United States Marine Corps serving from 1958 to 1963, including playing football on Okinawa. In several interviews, he described being wounded in combat and repeatedly claimed to have served in Vietnam.[33][34][35]
In 1999, he apologized for misrepresenting his military record, stating: "I lied about serving in Vietnam, and I'm sorry. I did not mean to take away from the actions and the sacrifices of the ones who did really serve there... I did steal valor. That was very wrong of me. There is no real excuse for that."[36]
Personal life
Dennehy married for the first time while in the Marines in 1959. Before he finished college he and his first wife had three daughters.[13] Two of them became actresses, including Elizabeth Dennehy.[37] After his first marriage ended in divorce in 1987, he married Jennifer Arnott, an Australian, in 1988, they had two children, a son and a daughter.[4]
^ Some sources say Dennehy attended or earned a degree at the Yale School of Drama.[1][15] Nothing similar appears in Dennehy's New York Times obituary,[4] and Yale publications that routinely identify graduates do not identify Dennehy that way.[16][17] Nor is Yale mentioned in the interview published in Columbia College Today that discusses his early years at length.[13] Dennehy once described the decade following his graduation from Columbia without mentioning Yale: "From 1965 to 1974 I served the best possible apprenticeship for an actor. 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".[10]
