After years playing Hollywood heavies, Brian Dennehy stunned Broadway with lead performances in two Arthur Miller plays and won Tony awards for each. Now poised to bring his 'Death of a Salesman' to the West End stage, he talks to Jasper Rees

If you saw a lot of American movies in the 1980s, you saw a lot of Brian Dennehy.

Brian Dennehy: 'the American disease is about winning'

He was tough as old boots in films such as First Blood, Presumed Innocent and Gorky Park. Hollywood would be nothing without supporting actors like him. A man-mountain of Irish provenance, he may have filled the screen, but he was never quite allowed to dominate an entire film. Whatever it takes to make a star - looks, vulnerability, snake hips - Dennehy seemed not quite to have it.

The only way for him to top the bill was to veer off the beaten track. He took the lead role in Peter Greenaway's Belly of an Architect, and, lured by the director Robert Falls, he also started disappearing for six months at a time to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago where, rather than play a tough, he would do a tough play, among them The Iceman Cometh and Galileo.

Then in 1998 he took on the great American role in Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller's post-war masterpiece about a white-collar worker on the scrapheap transferred to New York, where Dennehy's Willy Loman won a Tony award. Two years ago he won another one, for Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

"If you get to play Willy Loman and James Tyrone on Broadway, you better f***in' win a Tony. Two of the greatest parts ever written. I mean, they were good performances, don't get me wrong - I'm not being falsely modest here because I'm never modest about anything. But I don't have any illusions about it.

"In terms of my career, it doesn't really mean that much. It does mean that you can probably sell some tickets in New York. "

What it does mean is that, at 66, Dennehy is now in the top league, and finally British theatregoers have a chance to see why. Seven years since he first played him, Dennehy is finally bringing Loman to London. He's not sure, however, that it'll be the same performance. The director - Falls - and the set are the same, but the rest of the Loman family are now played by leading British actors including recent Olivier winner Clare Higgins. More importantly, Dennehy is conscious that both he and the play are on shifting sands.

"The first time, I was younger and much more sure of myself in many different ways. I knew what was itching Willy. I had this sense that I specifically knew that Willy had these mental problems, in addition to the mess with his work and his wife and his kids. I'm much less sure about not only that but everything. The play just keeps unfolding.

"Arthur Miller came backstage in Boston after one of the last shows and said, 'It's really interesting how much it's changed. You really have learned a lot of new things.' I said, 'Arthur, if I did this 450 more times it would keep revealing itself to me.'"

The other development is that Miller died before this production could cross to this side of the Atlantic, where latterly his work found a warmer welcome. "Kazan [Elia Kazan directed the original 1949 production] said Miller didn't write this play - he released it. Arthur was a planet. He was a successful writer when I was 10 or 12 years old. I wouldn't say we were friends but were certainly good acquaintances. I saw him a week before he was dying. He was a big, big man, bigger than me. He was really ill and enormously diminished. We knew he was dying but the funny thing is it didn't make any difference when he died. It was still like a punch."

Dennehy himself - in terms of bulk - is enormously diminished these days. He once played American football for Columbia University and the Marine Corps, but by middle age he had bulked out enough for Greenaway to play on the visual similarity between Dennehy's splendid midriff and a Roman rotunda. But the belly of the actor is no more. "Yeah, I lost about 60 pounds. I still gotta lose another 15, 20 pounds."

The loss of weight and the gain in stature may seem unrelated, but Dennehy would argue that both are symptoms of the arrival of wisdom. "You really start getting good when you start getting the bullshit out - about yourself, who you are and what you've accomplished, how smart you are and how talented you are. You'd like to keep it but you can't. All those protective devices desert you. And all of a sudden it's you and whatever the hell it is existing inside of you. And that's when you do your best work."

In this particular role, Dennehy has an additional ace up his sleeve. He is perhaps the only Willy Loman who, in the decade or so before he took up acting at 30, actually went about his character's business.

"I was a very unsuccessful salesman. The thing about Willy is he actually has been a success. He's worked his whole life, bought his house, took care of his family. He just doesn't think he's a success. The problem is he's got his nose pressed up against that famous American window and life is happening on the other side of it. He doesn't realise that life is also happening on this side of it.

"The American disease is about winning. You gotta win. And one of the ways you measure winning is how much money you make and how well you live. The contradiction of being an American actor is I think I've done the best work that I've done in the last five or 10 years and in terms of making money it's been the least productive part of my career."

He actually mistrusts the word career - "It always seems to me like I'm falling down a flight of stairs" - but to younger actors he always passes on the career advice of a more famous contemporary. "Dustin Hoffman said one of the things you've got to do if you really think you're good and things begin to break for you is learn how to wait. I could never do that. I wanted to work. I like working. Some of the stuff I never should have done at all."

His father, a wire service editor for Associated Press in New York, warned him against being an actor. The irony is that he's now inclined to pass the gist of this advice on to the two young children of his second marriage.

"I had a wonderful high-school teacher who turned on a light in this room. Most of my rooms were dark in those days. I remember saying to my father, 'I'm kind of thinking about being an actor.' And my father, 'You can't be an actor. Nobody's an actor.' And I turned and walked away from it. It's all I wanted to do and what I should have been doing in the first place.

"Now I look at my kids and say that being an actor is the last thing in the world I would wish for them. It's such a difficult life. But you've heard this shit before from actors."

• 'Death of a Salesman' opens at the Lyric (0870 890 1107) on May 16.