Kelsey Grammer in 2005, immediately after the final episode of Frasier aired Photo: Paul Harris
When in 2004 Frasier is over, Kelsey Grammer Frasier Crane, as always, was not lost in the words: “Strive, seek, find and do not give up.” Quoting Tennyson's call for strong self-determination was moving and appropriate. As the screen went black, Crane landed in Chicago in search of new horizons and adventure. “Wish me luck,” he said to the woman next to him. It was a beautifully thought out farewell.
Nearly 34 million Americans watched Grammer say “Goodnight, Seattle” for the last time. By the time Frasier wrapped in 2004, Grammer's tenure as Dr. Crane, which began on Cheers in 1984, was the longest of any television actor since James Arness's 20-year stint on Gunsmoke. Grammer became the king of US sitcoms, earning $1.6 million for each half-hour episode. At the time, he was the highest paid actor on earth. When he left Fraser's sound stage for good, the world was at his feet.
Now salads and scrambled eggs are back on the menu. After nearly two decades of denying it would ever happen, Fraser is back and Grammer is back as Crane. The new season takes his smooth-talking psychologist back to Boston, where Cheers, the sitcom that launched his character, is set. And the odd couple dynamic that fueled Frasier, especially between the magnificently vain Dr. Crane and his salty father Martin, was played out when Frasier awkwardly interacted with his firefighter son Freddy. In other changes, the reboot features a noticeably less white cast and a much more diverse cast. But the first news about the ten-episode Paramount series+ the season is good. The old Fraser magic remains.
However, it's been a rocky 19 years for Grammer since the original eleven-season run came to an end. Not that his post-Fraser years were fruitless. By contrast, fans of Fraser's sharp, witty comedy and social acumen were giddily and frighteningly engaged. Simply put: Grammer has been involved in a lot of terrible projects.
The nadir may have been the abominable 2021 Netflix film Santa Claus is Back. Of course, it veered toward the “watchable” end of the streamer's turkey spectrum. But for an actor of Grammer's ability and stature, it was still a difficult choice. Filmed in a corner of East Yorkshire, it follows the festive reunion of the dysfunctional Hope Christmas family. Liz Hurley is a cannibal fashion editor, Chris Marshall plays a sexy man as good as he did in Love Actually, and John Cleese appears as a tweedy landowner who at one point impersonates a lusty bull.
Yet the film's star-studded cast is Grammer. He plays the titular father of Christmas, who abandoned his family 27 years ago, leaving them in a state of emotional isolation. Grammer has a shimmering charm in the role, and the film leans heavily into casting. But is Netflix's Christmas special really the grand horizon that America's favorite poetry-quoting psychiatrist has been craving? Where did Grammer go wrong?
The miracle of Grammer's early career was that everything went well. His childhood was marred by trauma. He was born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where his father owned the Greer's Place bar and restaurant. His parents divorced and he moved to New Jersey to live with his grandparents; his grandfather died of cancer when he was 12 years old.
An extraordinary series of tragedies followed. A year after his grandfather's death, his father was murdered by the mentally ill “anti-white” taxi driver Arthur B. Niles. Frank Allen Grammer Jr. was a magazine publisher on the island, and his well-documented murder led to rising racial tensions on St. Thomas. In July 1975, Grammer's sister, Karen, was kidnapped, attacked and killed. At the age of 20, Grammer had to identify his body. When Grammer called his grandfather to break the news, he reportedly responded, “This family is cursed.” Five years later, Grammer's two half-brothers drowned in a diving accident.
Grammer moved to New York to pursue an acting career. For a while he worked as a waiter at tables and slept in Central Park, but then entered the prestigious acting school of Juilliard. However, he left after two years and has since said he drowned out the grief over his sister's death with drugs and alcohol. (Substance abuse would continue to plague his career.) Over the next decade, he had a variety of small roles on television and on Broadway until his former Julliard girlfriend Mandy Patinkin suggested he audition for a role on the NBC sitcom “Cheers.”
Nadir? Grammer as Mr. Christmas in the Netflix series Santa Claus is Back. Photo: Lifestyle images/Alamy Stock Photo
Grammer was cast as Dr. Frasier Crane, a psychologist whose crumpled sex appeal captures the heart of Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) after her breakup with bartender Sam Malone (Ted Danson). Appearing in 1984's third season, his role was only supposed to last six episodes, but Grammer's charisma convinced producers to expand the role, and he became a regular at a seedy Boston bar.
By the time Cheers came to an end in 1993, Grammer was ready to jump ship. In 1989, he made a deal with three of the show's former producers – David Lee, David Angell and Peter Casey – to work on a spin-off. Another thing is in which direction it will go. After toying with ideas that included Grammer playing a quadriplegic multimillionaire publisher, Paramount decided that Grammer would return as Crane and the new series would follow his antics as a radio psychiatrist.
The team managed to achieve several concessions. Frazier will oversee Crane's return home to Seattle, trading in loud, sticky Boston for the cool new latte culture capital of the Pacific Northwest. Moreover, other than Crane, none of the characters from Cheers will be returning. This gave Grammer the opportunity to change the show away from the dismal success of its predecessor. His irritable affection for his elderly father Marty (John Mahoney) and intellectual squabbles with his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) became fan favorites.
With longevity came eccentricity. Grammer reportedly insisted that Frasier's set be kept refrigerated during filming, believing that comedy thrives in cooler temperatures. And his acting methods, in which he skipped rehearsals and memorized his lines in fragments to give the role more authenticity, caused irritation among his fellow actors.
Crowning moment: Grammer in the final episode of the original Frasier series Photo: NBC
There was a dark side to this unorthodoxy. As his popularity grew, Grammer's alcoholism and drug use worsened. In 1988, he was arrested for drunk driving and cocaine possession and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Two years later, he was rearrested for drug possession and sentenced to three years probation, a $500 fine and 300 hours of community service. In 1996, three years after Fraser launched, he drove his Dodge Viper into a wall while drunk; his actors came to his aid, and production was suspended for a month while he dried out in rehab.
“He was seeping into the studio, his life was completely out of whack,” Frasier writer Dan O'Shannon told GQ in 2012. be perfect. And Jimmy screamed, “Stop!” and he oozed back into Kelsey, glassy-eyed, half asleep, experiencing what he was going through.”A stint in rehab smoothed things out, but Grammer's personal life remained uneven. He has been married four times and has seven children by four different women. In 1995, he was accused of having sexual relations with a minor with his 15-year-old babysitter, but after hearing her allegations and Grammer's strong denial, a grand jury threw out the case, citing a year-long delay in filing charges and subsequent delays. lack of physical evidence.
His second marriage, to exotic dancer Leigh-Anne Chouhani, lasted only a year; Grammer claimed that Chouhani verbally abused him and shot him with a gun. He filed for an annulment and evicted her from the house when she was three months pregnant, and she subsequently miscarried during a suicide attempt. He met his third wife, Camila Donatacci, an actress and star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, on a blind date. Their 14-year relationship was marked by internal spats and tabloid slander. Reminiscing about his ex-wife, Grammer said in 2019, “I don't really talk about her that much because most of her life is spent talking about me.”
Grammer with Camilla Donatacci in 2004. Photo: New York Daily News Archive
He hasn't had much better luck in his acting career since Fraser. His grand return to Broadway in the title role of Macbeth was a disaster. Directed by Terry Hands of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Grammer's Scottish warlord was rated by John Simon of New York magazine as “not terrible, just unpoetical, untragic and uninteresting.” The show closed after just 13 performances; Grammer lost his entire $1.5 million personal investment in the project.
Things weren't much better on the big screen. The 1996 film Periscope, in which Grammer played an uptight Navy commander tasked with turning around a sloppy submarine, tried to contain the same manic energy as Airplane! Instead, he bottomed out in the shallows of critical ridicule and audience indifference. Curiously, Grammer did better in projects that minimized his screen presence and used his growling, distinctive voice: perhaps the domed Crane's presence was too recognizable.
He, for example, had a bracingly grumpy cameo as Prospector Stinky Pete in Toy Story 2 (1999), and was buried under hours of fluffy blue makeup as Beast in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). Meanwhile, his longtime guest status as antagonist Bart Bob on The Simpsons has continued for more than two decades. His role as the psychotic mayor of Chicago on The Boss from 2011 to 2012 received acclaim (though it was canceled after just two seasons). And his cameo during the same period in Tina Fey's 30 Rock (playing himself) demonstrated a gift for comedic self-awareness.
However, he struggled to find opportunities as serious as Dr. Crane's. Of course, his staunch Republicanism couldn't help liberal Hollywood. In his early post-Fraser heyday, he called himself a moderate Republican and reportedly tried to run for government. But it's hard to call the 2008 film “An American Song” bipartisan. A series of smug left-wing documentaries follows a sleazy director—a thinly disguised Michael Moore—who wants to cancel the annual Fourth of July celebrations. However, before he can begin his nefarious anti-American plan, he is visited by three ghosts of great Americans of the past: country singer General George S. Patton and George Washington. Grammer played Patton; Jon Voight was Washington. Whatever your political beliefs, this movie is hard to like.
Yes, yes, sir: Grammer on periscope. Photo: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
“People are quick to judge, quick to react, quick to punish,” Grammer told The Guardian in 2018. He was referring to the backlash against Donald Trump's election, but he might as well have been describing the Twitter storm he inspired in 2015 when his wife Kate Walsh posted a photo of the actor wearing a T-shirt made by the pro-choice group Abort73. “Would we be more concerned if they used guns?” the T-shirt asked, and Walsh captioned the image, “#standwithbabies.” It was hardly the move of a man seeking further ascent to the sordid pole of Hollywood.
Grammer seems to take a throwaway approach to casting, hitting the bull's-eye every now and then, but more often than not hitting the plaster. Take the 2020 money plane. To be honest, this is a flimsy remake of Ocean's 11 on a passenger plane. Honestly, it's a disaster that barely musters enough B-movie energy to get off the ground.
In it, Grammer plays a cigar-chomping kingpin – “Darius Emmanuel Grouch III”, aka “Rumble”, aka “The Baddest Motherfucker on the Planet”, who commissions a professional thief (played by WWE wrestler Adam “Edge” Copeland ) involving the theft of $40 million from a flying casino where interchangeable bumbling bad guys place illogical bets in the spirit of the game Squid. (“Man versus cobra!” “Man versus piranha!” “Man versus… another person!”)
At least Grammer looks like he's having fun. Whether he's belting out lines about “watching a man fuck an alligator” or going out in a blaze of Scarface-style glory (“It's Rumble time!”), he never seems to be embarrassed by his patented garbage that keeps it afloat. . In fact, when The Ringer asked him why he took on the role, he was surprisingly on top of things: “This movie came across my desk as an offer, and I thought he was a funny, mustache-twirling character who didn't change would be my life. sure, but put me in the sandbox with a new actor I like – Adam Copeland.”
For his part, Switzer was thrilled at the prospect of the Frasier star playing the villain. “Who doesn’t love Kelsey Grammer? Frasier Crane is now Scarface – I can’t believe we did it!” (When asked if there would be a sequel, he replied: “Money Sub. Money Copter. They didn't have money for a whole plane, so they just had to use a small helicopter.”)
Will Grammer show up? Don't write it off. After all, just last year he released two sequels to “Santa Claus Returns.” He also—in a more elevated move—hosted Kelsey Grammer's Historic Battles of America and formerly produced Phat Tuesdays, a docuseries about the '90s sitcom that launched the careers of prominent black comedians including Chris Tucker and Dave Chappell.
And, of course, the Frasier reboot. Previously, Grammer viewed returning to Dr. Crane as a matter of artistic integrity. (“It would be a stunning failure to do this and not do it better than the main series,” he told The Guardian in 2018.) And while early impressions were positive, no one until now had suggested that a remake was desperately needed.
He's back: Fraser returns for a new 10-episode series Photo: Chris Haston
So what has changed? It's possible that Grammer's tangled divorce proceedings are finally threatening to bring him down – and idle chatter like the Santa Claus series can't keep them at bay. “I've been divorced a few times,” he admitted to The National in 2014, “and it costs you a lot of money – in the end the lawyers get everything, don't they?” While his net worth is currently estimated to be around $60 million, he reportedly parted with at least $30 million after splitting from his ex-wife Camilla in 2010—the same year he put his Belle mansion up for sale. Air for $18 million.
But that may not be all that motivates Grammer. As he reflected, the difficulties of his childhood convinced him of the value of bribery, courage and ingenuity. “I think it's your duty to overcome what you've inherited in life,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. This is the line from David Copperfield: “Will I be the master of my destiny or its victim?” However, I am not going to become his victim. I often felt like a victim.”
Whether he's playing a gangster or dressing up as Santa Claus, Grammer is Hollywood's most phone-covered actor: despite the omnipresent stench of sewage, nothing seems to stick to him. Grit is in his DNA. Strive, search, find and not give up? Oh yeah: that about sums up Grammer.
The new season of the series “Frasier” is released on Paramount+ now
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