John Mahoney
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- This article is about the actor. For the United States federal judge, see John Christopher Mahoney.
| John Mahoney | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 20, 1940 Blackpool, England |
| Occupation | Character actor |
John Mahoney (born June 20, 1940) is an Anglo-American actor best known for playing Martin "Marty" Crane in the popular TV show Frasier, as Kelsey Grammer's character Dr. Frasier Crane's retired policeman father.
Mahoney was born in Blackpool, England, and was largely raised in Manchester (his mother was evacuated to Blackpool while she was pregnant due to the outbreak of World War II). He moved to the United States as a young man 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 to speed up the citizenship process and to become a U.S. citizen.
Mahoney later lost all traces of his original Mancunian accent, but he did resurrect it once on Frasier, while mocking Daphne Moon (played by English actress Jane Leeves).
He lived in Macomb, Illinois and taught English at Western Illinois University in the early 1970s, before finally settling in Oak Park, Illinois. He served as editor for a medical journal publisher through much of the 1970's.
Disillusioned with his career, Mahoney later said he realized that as he was approaching middle age, he was coming to terms with his future, which made him very depressed. Ready for a change, Mahoney took acting classes at St. Nicholas Theater that inspired him to quit his day job and pursue acting full time, and after a stage production in 1977, fellow actor John Malkovich encouraged him to join Steppenwolf Theatre. He did and was very successful.
He made his film debut in 1980, and has played supporting roles in such films as Suspect and Moonstruck (both 1987), Frantic and Betrayed (both 1988), Say Anything... (1989), Barton Fink (1991), In the Line of Fire (1993), Striking Distance (1993), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), The American President (1995), Primal Fear (1996), and The Broken Hearts Club (2000).
He also provided the voices for several characters in the animated film Antz (1998), as well as Whitmore in Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Although he has often played "good guy" roles, Mahoney has occasionally gone into "bad guy" territory, evident by his work in Reality Bites as a diva talk show host who torments Winona Ryder's character.
He appeared in Frasier from its inception in 1993 until the final episode in 2004, and received numerous Emmy and Golden Globe award nominations for this role.
Coincidentally, Mahoney also appeared in an episode of Cheers as an inept jingle writer, including a brief conversation with Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), whose father he would later play.
He has since returned to his home in Chicago to work with the Steppenwolf Theatre again. Mahoney cites theatre as his first passion.
John Mahoney has never married. He is fond of cats. He also voiced Kronk's Papi in Kronk's New Groove, later replaced by Jeff Bennett in The Emperor's New School.
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Categories: 1940 births | English actors | English film actors | Cheers actors | Chicago actors | Frasier actors | Living people | Naturalized citizens of the United States | Roman Catholic entertainers | Tony Award winners | English Roman Catholics | People from Blackpool | Quincy University alumni
