Making a late career change is the best thing we can do in life

There are many things that are enviable about the life of Frasier actor John Mahoney, who died this week at the age of 77.

From 1993 to 2004, he played the curmudgeonly father of Niles and Frasier in the spin-off from Cheers, which has often been declared “the greatest sitcom of all time”.

In a show distinctive for its strong characters, it was generally Martin Crane – a police detective, forced to retire after a gunshot wound – who emerged as the star of an episode, transcending his lurid green reclining chair and Eddie the dog.

Off-screen, Mahoney was also an intriguing character – the seventh of eight children, born in Manchester but determined to make a life of his own design in the United States.

But perhaps the most alluring thing about him is that he is a brilliant and surprising example of blissfully happy, late-in-life career change.

In his thirties he was the editor of a medical journal. Before that, he served in the Army and worked as a hospital orderly. With his 40th birthday looming, on a whim he took an eightweek acting class taught by esteemed playwright and author David Mamet.

It was Mamet’s pal John Malkovich who convinced Mahoney to join Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Within a decade Mahoney had won a Tony for his work and at the age of 53 he was cast in Frasier. One thought, he said, propelled him: “I’ve got to try it before it’s too late.”

We tell ourselves that a radical career change is hard. It is. But, I can attest, it’s also dizzyingly liberating, even without a Tony to show for it.

For many years I was a journalist tied to my desk. In my late thirties I took up stand-up comedy. Now, closing in on my mid-forties, on Monday I was on a bill with Rob Delaney from TV’S Catastrophe and spent Friday night being heckled by a man who looked like he’d just got out of prison.

This was not quite what I expected of middle age. It’s so much better.

Yes, of course, there are times when you wish you could be doing these things at the age of 21. I often find myself slapping on some self-deluding anti-ageing make-up of an evening, looking in the mirror and thinking it might have been better to do this at a time of life when I did not have an incipient beard growing out of my face.

But I wouldn’t have had the patience or the selfbelief as a younger person. Everything comes at the right time.

The fact is, multiple late career changes are becoming commonplace for all of us. Julia Child wrote her first cookbook at 50. Vera Wang went into fashion design at 40. Donald Gap opened Gap at 40 with zero retail experience.

We’re all living longer. Job tenures are shorter. The average person is predicted to hold 12 to 15 jobs in a lifetime. With the pension age at 67 and rising (and the average working life 46 years long), retirement is a pipe dream. It’s easier – essential, even – to fit several lives into one.

Mahoney once explained: “It must have been a very, very deep dissatisfaction with my life and the way it was going, the realisation that I had to do something or I was just going to be a miserable, complaining, crabby old man.”

And why be that man in real life when you can get paid to pretend to be him on screen? What a joy. May we all be so lucky – and daring – in life.