John Mahoney, Steppenwolf and ‘Frasier’ actor, dead at 77
Millions of people thought they knew actor John Mahoney from his work in the NBC sitcom Frasier – for 11 hit seasons from 1993 through 2004, he played a cranky Seattle police officer who’d taken a bullet to the hip and then been forced to live with his neurotic son. But the famously private Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member was far more than the Hollywood gossip columnists ever knew.
Mahoney died Sunday at the age of 77 of complications from throat cancer.
For one thing, Mahoney was born British, despite his having no trace of an accent. He was a child of Manchester, England, a wartime evacuee to Blackpool on the Lancashire coast. Born in 1940, he first came to Illinois when he was 11 to visit his sister Vera, a war bride. That visit made such an impression on his boyhood self, Mahoney found his way back to Chicago eight years later, under his sister’s sponsorship. And he never went back to Britain to live, becoming a US citizen in 1959.
For another, Mahoney hated Los Angeles and greatly preferred Oak Park, where he lived quietly for years. Once Frasier was over, Mahoney refused to participate in the usual nostalgic reunions. He didn’t show up in 2001 when no less than Oprah Winfrey invited the entire cast of the sitcom onto her vaunted talk show.
Mahoney was always grateful for what Frasier had done for him and took care to say so on numerous occasions. His success on that show meant that, thereafter, he could focus on Chicago theater, his great love, and on the Steppenwolf Theatre in particular.
There was something else unusual about Mahoney – he came to the profession that would make him famous uncommonly late. Only in his 40s did Mahoney become a professional actor.
Mahoney’s late bloom happened during the Chicago theater renaissance in the late 1970s. In 1979, his friends John Malkovich and Gary Sinise invited him to join their still-nascent Steppenwolf, after they’d seen him taking acting classes at the St. Nicholas Theatre Company. At the time, the early ensemble members were allowed to sponsor the entrance of others.
“We were a bunch of kids,” distraught Steppenwolf co-founder Terry Kinney said Monday night, recalling his early years with Mahoney. “John was a little bit older, so that meant he could credibly play 40 years old, and he was such a character actor, so Malkovich brought him over.”
Mahoney’s body of work is formidable. Aside from Frasier and his stage work in Chicago, he appeared in the 1987 Barry Levinson film Tin Men, and such movies as Eight Men Out, The Hudsucker Proxy and, most memorably for many, both Moonstruck and Barton Fink. On Broadway, Mahoney appeared in the resonant 2007 revival of Prelude to a Kiss. Back in 1986, he received a Tony Award for his work in Jerry Zaks’ production of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. But he always wanted to come home to Chicago, whose mayor, Rahm Emanuel, said in a statement Monday that Mahoney’s contribution to the city would “endure for generations to come.”
(Chicago Tribune/TNS)