Brian Dennehy

It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.

I've got two artificial knees, I have an artificial shoulder, and I'm reasonably healthy given the damage I've done to myself. Everything hurts.

My problem is, if any place I'm sleeping catches on fire, I've got a problem because it takes me 20 minutes to get everything moving in the morning.

Theater is a physical activity as much as anything. It's harder for me to learn the lines than it was 30 years ago. At the same time, I'll never quit working in the theater - until I can't memorize two lines back to back.

No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.

I remember playing John Wayne Gacy, serial killer, very sick, neurotic, screwed-up guy. You know what? There's a part of me there, too, and you explore that.

I like sports. I'm a big football fan. When I was a kid, I was a... I don't even know how to describe it... I was an obsessed Brooklyn Dodgers fan. And I think when they left Brooklyn, which was simultaneous with me starting college, everything changed, and I haven't had the same passion for sports.

My father was a classic intellectual. From him I learned devotion, and I also learned about the life of the mind.

What really matters is that you do what you think is right, what you believe in, and you surround yourself with the people you care about in this world. That's what counts in this life.

My father had a good sense of humour about a lot of things, including life, which I think I inherited.

From 1965 to 1974, I served the best possible apprenticeship for an actor. I learned firsthand how a truck driver lives, what a bartender does, how a salesman thinks. I had to make a life inside those jobs, not just pretend.

If I could transform my stage life to the movies, I'd be Jack Nicholson.