Frasier actor John Mahoney dies at 77

Frasier actor John Mahoney has died of complications from throat cancer at the age of 77 following a successful career in showbusiness that began with his move from Blackpool to the US.

Mahoney became a household name playing Martin Crane, the gruff father of Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier, an elitist Seattle radio psychiatrist, and his highly strung brother Niles, in the hit sitcom, which ran for 11 years on the NBC network.

“While Frasier, with his overextended ego and sharp line in cod psychology, and Niles, his effete brother, cracked their knowing, snobbish jokes, it was Martin, the retired Seattle cop, who provided the show’s soul,” says The Daily Telegraph.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Mahoney had an eventful life even before beginning his acting career, however.

“He was a child of Manchester, England, and wartime evacuee to Blackpool on the Lancashire coast,” the Chicago Tribune says. At the age of 11, he visited his sister - a war bride living in Illinois - and returned to Chicago eight years later under his sister’s sponsorship, becoming a US citizen in 1959.

After a brief stint in the US army, Mahoney became an English teacher, and later the editor of a medical journal. It was not until his late 30s that he decided to become an actor.

A couple of years later, in the late 1970s, John Malkovich and Gary Sinise invited Mahoney to join their Steppenwolf Theater Company, where he found success, Rolling Stone says. Mahoney won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 1986, for his role in a Broadway production of The House of Blue Leaves, and made his film debut in Tin Men the following year. He went on to appear in films including Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything..., and the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink.

But it was his role as Frasier’s blunt-talking, wisecracking father for which he is best remembered, the BBC says.

David Hyde Pierce, who played his son Niles and who won the 1999 Golden Globe over Mahoney, said in his acceptance speech at the time: “The greatest honor the Academy has ever given me, is to put me in the same category with John Mahoney.”

Cheers star Ted Danson told Rolling Stone that “John could do anything as an actor; he was so nimble. He was also a gentleman. His kindness radiated from him.”

Tributes also poured in on Twitter from actor Ben Stiller, writer-director Cameron Crowe and NBC, while Frasier casting director Jeff Greenberg said they had spent “11 glorious years together”.

NBC paid tribute to Mahoney as a “classically trained British-born character actor who excelled at portraying working-class Americans”.