Brian Dennehy
Brian Dennehy is an actor, born 1938.
Brian Dennehy was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1938 and arrived on screen late, taking bit parts in Semi-Tough, F.I.S.T. and 10 as he turned forty. His breakthrough was Sheriff Will Teasle in First Blood (1982), and it is worth remembering how that part is written: Teasle is no monster, he is a small-town lawman who is certain he is right and escalates from there. Dennehy played him with total conviction, which is why the film works at all.
That was the whole trick. He was a big, warm, chatty presence who could turn a line into a threat without raising his voice, and directors used the two settings against each other. In 1985 he was both the corrupt sheriff Cobb in Silverado and the benevolent alien Walter in Cocoon. He is the father in Tommy Boy, the head of one warring house in Romeo + Juliet, the district attorney in Presumed Innocent, and the rat patriarch in Ratatouille.
The stage was the other half of the life and arguably the better half. He won two Tony Awards for Best Lead Actor, for Death of a Salesman in 1999 and Long Day's Journey into Night in 2003, plus a Laurence Olivier Award and a Golden Globe, and was once described as perhaps the foremost living interpreter of Eugene O'Neill. Television brought six Emmy nominations and a Screen Actors Guild award.
He died in 2020. The last stretch is quietly the best of it: Knight of Cups, Chekhov in The Seagull, and Driveways, all of them old men with nothing left to prove, and he was extraordinary in them.
Movies (53)
- Ratatouille (2007)
- First Blood (1982)
- The Ultimate Gift (2007)
- Romeo + Juliet (1996)
- Tag (2018)
- Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
- Presumed Innocent (1990)
- Cocoon (1985)
- Righteous Kill (2008)
- Tommy Boy (1995)
- The Next Three Days (2010)
- Silverado (1985)
- The Big Year (2011)
- Gladiator (1992)
- 10 (1979)
- F/X (1986)
- Gorky Park (1983)
- Foul Play (1978)
- Knight of Cups (2015)
- Everyone's Hero (2006)
- F/X2 (1991)
- 10th & Wolf (2006)
- Summer Catch (2001)
- Marco Polo (2007)
- Fail Safe (2000)
- She Hate Me (2004)
- Every Day (2010)
- Legal Eagles (1986)
- F.I.S.T. (1978)
- Semi-Tough (1977)
TV (11)
Where to start with Brian Dennehy
First Blood is the obvious first stop and it earns the position. Watch how little he does to make Teasle frightening, and how much of the film's tension comes from his certainty rather than his size.
Then take the 1985 double bill. Silverado and Cocoon arrived months apart, one a corrupt lawman and the other the kindest character in a film about kindness, and between them they explain why he worked for four decades.
For the late work, Driveways is the one to see, a small, unhurried film made near the end of his life in which he does more with silence than most actors manage with a monologue. The Seagull sits in the same register.
If you want him in the mainstream, Tommy Boy is funnier than it has any business being, Presumed Innocent is his best procedural, and Ratatouille is the voice you have heard without knowing whose it was.