Biografie

His father was murdered in 1968 in the Virgin Islands. His sister, Karen Elisa Grammer, was murdered in 1975 while finishing a shift working at a Red Lobster in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Had two stepbrothers (from his father's second marriage) that were killed in a shark/scuba accident.

In memory of his sister who was raped and murdered, he named his daughter Spencer Karen (Karen was his sister's first name).

On one episode of Die Simpsons (1989), while he portrayed the recurring character Sideshow Bob, David Hyde Pierce supplied the voice of Kelsey's brother, mimicking the relationship between the two on Frasier (1993). This joke was repeated and extended a decade later, when Pierce once again played Bob's brother, and John Mahoney once again played their father.

His favorite episode of Frasier (1993) was Ham Radio (1997).

Is the only actor to be nominated for an Emmy Award for three television series, all for the same character (Frasier Crane in Cheers (1982), Frasier (1993) and a guest appearance on Überflieger (1990)).

Life is supposed to get tough.

I lost a lot of stuff when Karen died. It took about a year to get back to even thinking that there might be a reason to go on.

I got fired when I was a dishwasher at Denny's. That set me back a little bit. You don't realize how important dishwashers are until you do the job.

[on his role as Tom Kane the brutal mayor of Chicago on Boss (2011)] He's an exciting character and a lot of fun to play. Iago is one of the most liked characters in Shakespeare's canon and he's the most evil, most extraordinarily manipulative person in history. He says the worst, most politically incorrect things, even for the time the play is set in - and yet audiences adore that character. There's some similarity there with Tom Kane. The discovery of this man has been a discovery of things I've never done or said before.

Actors are observers of human life, of human behavior. If you've any smarts and any powers of observation, you kind of know what's going on inside a person like Tom Kane, and you just bring it out naturally. It's part of who you are. That's what you're good at.