CHICAGO _ Brian Dennehy, a veteran American actor of towering presence, a lover of Chicago theater, and the nation's leading interpreter of the tragedies of Eugene O'Neill, died Wednesday following a hospital stay in New Haven, Conn.
His death, which was from cardiac arrest due to sepsis, was announced by his agent, Brian Mann. Dennehy was 81.
Dennehy won two Tony Awards, six Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe. His film career included "Cocoon," "Tommy Boy," "Presumed Innocent," and, perhaps most notably, "The Belly of an Architect," for which he won the best actor award at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1997. His television roles were legion and included a memorably intense ESPN movie in which he played the notorious Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight.
But he often referred to those TV jobs as necessities to pay his bills and keep working.
Dennehy was an inveterate creature of the stage, a tireless tragedian of the old school. That was where his heart resided. The theater's unique rituals were his lifeblood and he carried the greatest roles of the dramatic canon on his back like heavy weights he was honor-bound to lift.
His formidable stage career was highlighted by numerous epic O'Neill collaborations with Goodman artistic Robert Falls, including "Desire Under the Elms," "The Iceman Cometh," "Hughie," and "A Touch of the Poet." All began at the Goodman but went on to multiple productions across the nation, often including Broadway.
The two men also worked together on a stunning 1998 production of "Death of a Salesman," which starred Dennehy as Willy Loman and forever changed how Arthur Miller's great drama of the underbelly of all-American capitalism was viewed.
"Brian has been my closest collaborator over 40 years," an emotional Falls said Thursday. "I am so fortunate to have met him. Our lives have been joined at the hip since then. We had our biggest successes together. And both our lives were changed together."
Throughout Chicago theater, and the American theater at large, there was a sense of the passing of a huge figure, a link to a quickly vanishing era.
Dennehy was also a favorite, and a marquee name, at the Stratford Festival of Canada, where he regularly appeared in the works of William Shakespeare.
"No other actor has so defined himself by the greatest roles of the 20th century," Falls said. "Brian was a giant man and he wanted to take giant risks every time he came up to bat."
Dennehy was born in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1938. He worked in Chicago so often, many in the city thought he lived here, rather than in a farmhouse in Connecticut, not coincidentally the state that most informed the work of O'Neill. Although he slowed down over the years, he was known for his singular enjoyment of his work and the post-show rituals that followed: "great times, great times," he would often say when describing his latest project.
"Chicago is a great town," he told the Tribune five years ago, with a wistful tone. "I don't know if it's a great town when you're 76. But it's a great town when you're 56. Pretty damn good at 66; 46 is the best."
And unlike most actors, Dennehy was never leery of critics and theater journalists. Indeed, he had a particular understanding of them, in all their neuroses. He often attributed this to his father working for the Associated Press, meaning that his son carried a certain sympathy for the state of newspapers and for "ink-stained wretches," a phrase he liked. Dennehy relished giving interviews, talking about his work and, improbably, even the tension of overnight reviews, probably because he knew he had dived as deep as any human could be expected to submerge himself
Dennehy reserved his rage for anyone not giving the canonical playwrights of the American theater their full due, especially Miller and O'Neill. He had no truck with criticism of even their minor works, arguing that their accomplishments were such that the naysayers were the fools.
"They produced 'Iceman' in 1946," he said in a 2015 interview. "Nobody gave a s_- about O'Neill then, and it failed. But he was about to write the greatest plays of his life. He was on everyone's lips _ one year after he died. Ha! Ha!"
Survivors include his second wife Jennifer Arnott (his first wife Judith Lee Scheff Dennehy died in 2015) and five children, Elizabeth Dennehy, Cormack Dennehy, Kathleen Dennehy, Deirdre Dennehy, and Sarah Dennehy.
