When Brian Dennehy takes to the stage of Dublin's Olympia Theatre on 13 January, his role as a determined and ruth­less patriarch will be one with personal resonance for the 72-year-old American actor.

The powerful and tragic story of The Field, and its central character Bull McCabe, partly echoes the hardship endured by Dennehy's Irish grandparents. "I knew my grandfather, who was an extraordinary man – very, very tough, very hard, a very determined individual who left Ireland when he was 12 and on his own. I have based an awful lot of characters that I've played on him."

Dennehy is best-known for portraying hard men on screen,from the first Rambo movie, First Blood (1982), to the western Silverado (1985). But Dennehy can also pull the punches in the emotional sense, especially on the stage. He says it is there that "you can use yourself to make the audience see something about themselves that they didn't understand before".

Twice Tony award-winning Dennehy has triumphed on Broadway in roles written by modern theatre's greatest names, playing the lead in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, and Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, in which he played Max. Even though theatre, with its long runs, brings particular demands – he played tragic Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman more than 650 times in three years – Dennehy says every time he creates that role, "you learn it in a different way".

His dream from an early age was to become a successful actor. In 1959, when John B Keane first got the idea for his story of a vengeful farmer obsessed with the field he believes is rightfully his, the young Connecticut-born, Brooklyn-raised Brian Dennehy had just enlisted in the marines.

Four years later, he was awarded a football scholarship to Columbia university in New York, but took on a number of jobs outside college to help fund his next move – to study drama at Yale.

First acting breaks were in popular '70s' television series such as Kojak, Lou Grant and Dallas. He is circumspect about his many films, especially the more recent ones, admitting that he finds it "too hard to watch the whole thing".

Theatre has become more and more his natural home, and playing the Bull McCabe is a role he is sure to find particularly affecting. His 19th-century ancestors were "genuine peasants". Like Keane's anti-hero farmer, "they were allowed to keep little plots of land, but they didn't own the land", he told one interviewer earlier last year.

Many theatre-goers will draw contemporary parallels with The Field's depiction of the Irish obsession with land and ownership. For Dennehy, himself a descendant of impoverished emigrants, the bleak economic climate of that mid-20th century setting of the play is sadly even more familiar.

But we shouldn't be too despondent about whether or not all those young people leaving Ireland will succeed elsewhere.

"The immigrants like my grandfather who came were the tougher ones," he said last year.