Kelsey Grammer

A Difficult Guy at Juilliard

Kelsey Grammer was kicked out of the prestigious Juilliard school for skipping class. He was too busy dealing with the murder of his sister and drinking to forget that his father had also died violently years earlier. Nobody gave him a chance at the time.

He started in regional theater and jumped to Broadway in 1981 with a production of Macbeth that came and went without much notice. But television had a corner waiting for him in a Boston bar where the booze wasn't real. He joined Cheers in 1984 for what was supposed to be just six episodes.

And the gamble paid off.

Frasier Crane was meant to be a simple obstacle between the leads, but audiences got hooked on his pomposity. That stuffy psychiatrist lasted nine seasons in the original series. Grammer understood that physical comedy works best when the one falling down is wearing a three-piece suit.

The salary that broke the bank

In 1993, he took a risk with his own spin-off, which moved from Boston to Seattle. The series Frasier lasted eleven years on the air and earned him four Emmy Awards for Best Actor. He earned 1.6 million dollars per episode in the last two seasons of the original series.

But money did not cover up his substance problems. In 1996, he crashed his sports car while driving drunk and had to enter a rehab clinic in the middle of filming. Production did not stop (they simply wrote scripts where he appeared less).

Success consumed him.

Beyond comedy, he tried to carve out a place for himself in action movies and political drama. In 2011, he starred in Boss as the mayor of Chicago, but the Starz network canceled the show after two seasons due to low ratings. It was a hard blow for someone used to canned laughter.

Voice Work and Forced Comebacks

He has voiced Supporting Actor Bob on The Simpsons since 1990, earning another Emmy for that voice work. His baritone voice let him earn millions without having to sit in the makeup chair. So he alternated mediocre projects with brief appearances in franchises like X-Men during 2006.

In 2023, he decided to revive his most famous role for a new version on the Paramount+ streaming service. Filming moved back to Boston, and Grammer also served as executive producer to oversee every detail of the script. Critics were merciless toward the first episodes of this new chapter.

Despite the negative reviews, the series was renewed for a second batch of episodes in 2024. Grammer remains determined to milk nostalgia while the rest of the original cast refuses to return to the set.

The original series ran for 1993 seasons and earned 37 Emmy Awards in total.