John Mahoney – “Fraiser” Star / Tony Award Winning Actor

John Mahoney, a Tony Award winning and Emmy and Golden Globe nominated actor, was born in Blackpool, England on June 20, 1940, the seventh of eight children.

Mahoney moved to the United States aged 18 in March 1959 when his older sister Vera, a war bride living in rural Illinois, agreed to sponsor him. He studied at Quincy University, Illinois, before joining the United States Army. After graduating from Quincy, he lived in Macomb, Illinois and earned his Master’s degree in English from Western Illinois University, where he then taught English for several years in the late 1960s, before settling in Forest Park, Illinois, and later in Oak Park, Illinois. He became a US citizen in 1971 and served as editor of a medical journal through much of the 1970s.

Dissatisfied with his career, Mahoney took acting classes at St. Nicholas Theatre, which inspired him to resign from his day job and pursue acting full-time. After a stage production in Chicago in 1977, John Malkovich encouraged him to join the Steppenwolf Theatre. He did so and went on to win the Clarence Derwent Award as Most Promising Male Newcomer. Gary Sinise said in an interview for Bomb Magazine that Lyle Kessler’s play Orphans “kicked John Mahoney, Kevin Anderson and Terry Kinney off into the movie business” after their Steppenwolf performance of the play for which he won the Derwent Award and the Theatre World Award. Mahoney won Broadway‘s Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in John Guare‘s The House of Blue Leaves.

Mahoney’s first major film role was in the 1987 Barry Levinson film Tin Men. He went on to have prominent roles in a number of acclaimed films throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, including Moonstruck, Eight Men Out, Say Anything…, In the Line of Fire, Reality Bites, and The American President. He appeared in two Coen brothers films, Barton Finkand The Hudsucker Proxy.

Mahoney appeared in Frasier from its debut in 1993 until the final episode in 2004; Mahoney received two Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations for the role of Martin Crane, the father of Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) and Niles Crane (David Hyde Pierce).