Brian Dennehy to get Lifetime Achievement Award

Irish American stage and screen giant Brian Dennehy is set to be honored with the 2010 Eugene O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award by the Irish American Writers and Artists (IAW&A) association. He will receive the award at a special ceremony to be held at The Manhattan Club (upstairs at Rosie O’Grady’s, 800 7th Ave. at W. 52nd St.) on Monday October 18th.

Dennehy, whose grandfather hailed from Millstreet, Co. Cork, will be forever associated with Sheriff Will Teasle in 1982’s Rambo: First Blood, but has excelled in many more feature films including Gorky Park, Cocoon, Legal Eagles, Presumed Innocent, Tommy Boy, Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet and Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect, for which he received the Chicago Film Festival Award for Best Actor.

He has been nominated for Emmy Awards six times for his television movie roles, including for his performance as John Wayne Gacy in To Catch a Killer (1992) and for Our Fathers (2005), which focused on sex abuse in the Catholic Church. – Irish Emigrant

from the Irish Echo

… The family’s location can be partly attributed to the actor’s paternal grandfather who settled in the town, got a job with the Jenkins Valve Co. and never left. He’d grown up in Millstreet, Co. Cork, one of a large family born to a farm laborer.

“He was a very tough, unsentimental man, who understandably, given his childhood, which was very, very poor, had no particular noticeable affection for Ireland or his background in Ireland,” the actor recalled of Denis Dennehy. “He was extremely bitter about his childhood in Ireland and the way he had lived.

“He was very glad to be in America, and he had no interest in going back and he had no interest in listening to the music and had no interest in reading the poetry.

“My father, of course, in reaction to that, loved everything connected to Ireland,” he said.

Dennehy, who had a home in Ireland for many years, said he could understand both perspectives…

from the Irish Emigrant online newspaper

He has always felt a huge draw to Ireland and indeed called the country home for the best part of a decade.

“My grandfather was from Millstreet in Co. Cork. He literally left Cobh with zero- he had to fight for everything, built himself a real life over here. He was tough as hell. I was terrified of him in my early days but now I have a huge respect for what he did. He was ferocious. My grandmother was a Heaphy from Waterford, and my mother’s family were all Mannions.”

He goes on to detail frequent trips to West Cork and knows the area like the back of his hand; clearly this is a man in touch with his heritage.

“I’m not one of those guys you hear speaking with an Irish accent at the Jets games, or those Wall St. types who head to Ireland and only see the golf courses. Ireland is an essential part of my own self. I’m extremely comfortable there; in many ways it feels like going home. I enjoy the whole cultural pantheon: the music, the writing, the humor, the tragedy, the success. It’s a complicated place – a small, highly-educated nation. That can be a mixed blessing.”

Note: Brian Dennehy’s grandfather lived on Church Street (across from the Star Ballroom, which is now Millstreet Motor Factors) before emigrating to the USA.

Read biographoes of Brian Dennehy at tvguide.com, wikipedia, filmreference.com.

Lots of photos on what appeared to be a great night are at of the event at higginsphotonyc.com