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"Having Such a Good Time"
At first glance, Kelsey Grammer has a lot in common with Frasier Crane, the stuffy psychiatrist he’s best known for playing. With a limitless vocabulary and quick wit, Grammer conjures up the character easily. He lengthens his neck, lifts his chin, adds a dash of pomposity, and suddenly he’s belting out a preposterous line from the landmark sitcom. “Did no one hear me say that I bought a Hungarian goose?” he booms in a voice laced with self-importance.
The same bravado and wit that earned Grammer four Emmys for Frasier will come in handy when he takes on the role of narcissistic news anchor Chuck Darling in this fall’s new Fox sitcom Back to You. But, Grammer says, in some ways the Scotch-sipping Darling, who admits he is “chock-full of Botox” in the show’s first episode, and Frasier are of a different breed. “Chuck’s ego is much more apparent,” Grammer says. While Frasier was all brain, Chuck is mostly gut and, Grammer jokes, a body part farther south.Grammer, 52, has made even the most scornful of his characters lovable by infusing them with a childlike quality. That’s because in real life, “he is such a little boy. Oh, that is so true,” says David Hyde Pierce, who played Frasier’s brother, Niles. “That’s what makes him so eminently watchable. Like a little kid, at the bottom of everything else, he’s just having such a good time.” That Grammer has maintained a youthful enthusiasm for life is all the more remarkable given the struggles he’s faced, beginning in his childhood. His own backstory is more the stuff of drama than comedy.
Grammer’s parents divorced when he was two, and Kelsey lived with his mother and grandparents in New Jersey, Florida and, later, New York. His father, who owned a bar and grill on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, was killed when Grammer was 13. When he was 20, his younger sister Karen was raped and murdered in Colorado. Kelsey had to identify her body. Five years later, his two half-brothers died while scuba diving.
Grammer is the first to admit that comedy saved him from the sadness. “I always had a predisposition toward seeing the comical in any situation,” he says. “It was a place where I felt alive. It gave me something to focus on and a sense of being useful.”
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