"It's a funny situation for me," he says, "because I'm a blue-collar actor. I mean this in the sense that acting is a job to me. It's a good job, an interesting job, and I wor -- Holy Jesus!" A waiter arrives with his second scotch. It's huge. "Send for the paramedics! Anyway -- I work hard at it, but I'm not a Jesuit, you know what I mean? I'm an actor. Like a carpenter.

"I don't spend very much time preparing before I go onstage," he continues. "As Jon Lovitz would say, it's acting. I watch actors stalk around the stage beforehand, banging their heads against walls, but -- " I point out that Hoffman got so tired doing the role he shaved off Saturday matinees. He cuts me off. "Fifty years ago, if you were Ralph Richardson or John Gielgud playing Richard III, you did it eight times a week. If you were John Barrymore, drunk off your ass, you were still doing great performances eight times a week. It's not easy, but it's not all that complicated."

In the late eighties, show-business people did think that Dennehy would be the Next Big Thing. He'd gotten ecstatic notices for his work in Peter Brook's The Cherry Orchard and supporting roles in big Hollywood features. But then . . .

"I said yes to some roles when I shoulda said no," admits Dennehy, presumably referring to the string of TV movies he made in the nineties. "I had to put three kids through college and grad school; I had an ex-wife. You know -- the same things that everybody else has."

Dennehy spent most of his early childhood in Red Hook and Floral Park. When Dennehy was 10, his father, a general-news editor for the Associated Press, and his mother, a nurse, moved the family to Mineola, where Dennehy played not only football at his all-male Catholic high school but Macbeth. Dennehy knew then that acting suited him. Nevertheless, he went to Columbia University, and then joined the Marines, before finally trying to break into show business. He worked as a truck driver, waiter, and bartender to keep solvent in those days, and didn't land his first real role -- in a New York production of Chekhov's Ivanov -- until he was 33.

His career has since cycled through many ups and downs -- with more downs than he would have liked in recent years. But playing Willy Loman has completely revived him. "It has restored in me a kind of faith I'd lost in what I was doing," says Dennehy. "You get to a certain age, and you say, 'What the fuck am I doing this for? It's one thing if you're 60 years old and you're Anthony Hopkins or Gene Hackman, and even Gene -- I'm sure he does a lot of shit he'd rather not do. But I don't even get asked to do the shit."

He orders one final scotch. "This will last for three months, maybe four, maybe six," he says. "And then that will recede into the past, and there'll be another job or there won't. That's the life. That's everybody's life. I got no problem with that."

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Jennifer Senior
• Table of Contents: Feb 15, 1999 issue of New York | Subscribe!