Kelsey Grammer is a great actor – why has he never made a great movie?

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” were almost the final words spoken by Kelsey Grammer on the last episode of Frasier. To quote Tennyson’s plea to rugged self-determination was moving, and apposite. As the screen faded to black, Frasier Crane touched down in Chicago in search of fresh horizons and new adventures. “Wish me luck,” he said to the woman next to him. It was a beautifully judged farewell.

Nearly 34 million Americans tuned in to watch Grammer say “Goodnight, Seattle” one last time. By the time Frasier wrapped in 2004, Grammer’s run as Dr Crane, which had begun on Cheers in 1984, had been the longest of any TV actor since James Arness’s 20-year turn on Gunsmoke. Grammer had become the US sitcom king, commanding $1.6 million for each half-hour episode. He was the highest paid actor on earth at the time. As he stepped off the Frasier soundstage for good, he had the world at his feet.

Fast-forward 17 years. It’s November 2021, and Netflix has released its annual Christmas stinker. Called Father Christmas is Back, it’s towards the “watchable” end of the spectrum of turkeys that the streamer has released. Filmed in a twee corner of east Yorkshire, it concerns the festive reunion of the dysfunctional Hope-Christmas family. Liz Hurley is a man-eating fashion editor, Kris Marshall plays an undersexed man just as well as he did in Love Actually, and John Cleese pops up as a tweedy landowner who, at one point, impersonates a randy bull.

Yet the film’s starriest casting is Grammer. He plays the titular father Christmas, who walked out on his family 27 years previously, leaving them in a state of emotional suspended isolation. Grammer has a twinkly charm in the role, and the film leans into this stunt casting. But is a Netflix Christmas special really the grand horizon that was yearned for by America’s favourite poetry-quoting shrink? Where did Grammer go wrong?

The miracle of Grammer’s early career was that anything went right at all. His childhood was shadowed by trauma. He was born on the Caribbean island of St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, where his father owned a bar and restaurant, Greer’s Place. His parents divorced, and he moved to New Jersey to live with his grandparents; his grandfather died of cancer when he was 12.

An extraordinary series of tragedies followed. The year after his grandfather passed away, his father was murdered by a mentally ill “anti-white” taxi driver, Arthur B Niles. Frank Allen Grammer Jr had been a magazine publisher on the island, and his well-documented killing led to a rise in racial tensions on St Thomas. In July 1975, Grammer’s sister, Karen, was kidnapped, assaulted and killed. Aged just 20, Grammer had to identify her body. When Grammer phoned his grandfather to tell him the news, he reportedly replied: “This family is cursed.” Five years later, Grammer’s two half-brothers drowned in a scuba-diving accident.

Grammer moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He waited on tables and slept rough in Central Park for a period, but made it into the prestigious Julliard acting school. Yet he left after two years, and he has since said he tampened down the grief of his sister’s death with drugs and alcohol. (Substance abuse would continue to dog his career.) Over the next decade, he had a variety of small parts on TV and Broadway, until his former Julliard friend, Mandy Patinkin, suggested he audition for a role on the NBC sitcom Cheers.

Grammer was cast as Dr Frasier Crane, a psychologist whose crumpled sex appeal was to snare the heart of Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) after her breakup with bartender Sam Malone (Ted Danson). Appearing in 1984, in the third season, his role was supposed to last only six episodes, but Grammer’s charisma persuaded producers to expand the role, and he became a regular fixture at the grubby Bostonian bar.

By the time Cheers came to an end in 1993, Grammer was already poised to jump ship. In 1989, he had cut a deal with three of the show’s former producers – David Lee, David Angell and Peter Casey – to work on a spin-off. Which direction it would take, though, was another matter. After knocking around ideas that included Grammer playing a paraplegic multi-millionaire publisher, the studio, Paramount, put its foot down: Grammer would return as Crane, and the new series would follow his antics as a radio psychiatrist.

The team managed to wrangle a few concessions. Frasier would follow Crane’s return home to Seattle, trading the brawling stickiness of Boston for the Pacific Northwest’s newly-cool capital of latte culture. Moreover, aside from Crane, no other characters from Cheers would be back. This gave Grammer the chance to shape the show away from the overshadowing success of its predecessor. His crotchety affection for his elderly father Marty (John Mahoney) and his intellectual sparring with his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) became fan favourites.

With longevity came eccentricity. Grammer reportedly insisted that the Frasier set was kept refrigerated during filming, believing comedy thrived in cooler temperatures. And his acting methods, whereby he would skip rehearsals and patchily learn his lines to bring greater authenticity to the role, caused conniptions among his fellow cast members.

There was a darker side to this unorthodoxy, too. With fame, Grammer’s alcoholism and drug-taking escalated. In 1988, he was arrested for drunk-driving and cocaine possession and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Two years later, he was re-arrested for drug possession and given a three-year probationary sentence, $500 fine and 300 hours of community service. In 1996, three years after Frasier launched, he smashed his Dodge Viper into a wall while drunk; his cast members came to his rescue and production was suspended for a month while he dried out in a rehab clinic.

“He would ooze into the studio, his life all out of sorts,” Frasier writer Dan O’Shannon told GQ in 2012. “Jimmy would say ‘action’, and he would snap into Frasier and expound in this very erudite dialogue, and be pitch-perfect. And Jimmy would yell ‘cut!’ and he would ooze back into Kelsey – glazed-over eyes, half asleep, going through whatever he was going through.”

The stint in rehab smoothed things out, but Grammer’s personal life remained jagged. He has been married four times, and has seven children from four different women. In 1995, he was accused of having underage sex with his 15-year-old babysitter, but after hearing her claims, and Grammer’s steadfast denial, a grand jury threw out the case, citing the year-long delay in pressing charges and the consequent lack of physical evidence.

His second marriage, to exotic dancer Leigh-Anne Csuhany, lasted only a year; Grammer alleged that Csuhany was abusive and fired a gun at him. He filed for annulment and evicted her from their home when she was three months pregnant, and she subsequently miscarried during a suicide attempt. He met his third wife, Camille Donatacci, an actor and star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, on a blind date. Their 14-year relationship was marked by domestic tiffs and tabloid back-biting. Reflecting on his ex-wife, Grammer said in 2019: “I don’t really talk about her so much because so much of her life is spent talking about me.”

He wasn’t much luckier in his post-Frasier acting career. His grand return to Broadway, in the title role of Macbeth, was a flop. Directed by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Terry Hands, Grammer’s Scottish warlord was judged “not awful, merely unpoetic, untragic, uninteresting,” by New York magazine’s John Simon. The show closed after only 13 performances; Grammer lost his entire $1.5 million personal investment in the project.

It didn’t get much better on the big screen. 1996’s Down Periscope, in which Grammer played an uptight Navy commander assigned to turn around a slovenly submarine, tried to bottle the same madcap energy as Airplane! Instead, it bottomed out on the shoals of critical sneering and audience indifference. Curiously, Grammer fared better in ventures which minimised his on-screen presence and made use of his growly, distinctive voice: perhaps the dome-headed Crane was just too recognisable a presence.

He had an enliveningly grumpy cameo as Stinky Pete the Prospector in Toy Story 2 (1999), and he was buried under hours of furry blue make-up as Beast in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). Meanwhile, his long-running guest slot as Bart’s antagonist Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons has endured for more than two decades. His turn from 2011 to 2012 as Chicago’s psychotic mayor in Boss was acclaimed (though cancelled after only two seasons). And his cameo in the same period in Tina Fey’s 30 Rock (playing himself) showcased a gift for self-aware comedy.

Yet he has struggled to find opportunities as meaty as Dr Crane. Certainly, his staunch Republicanism can’t have helped in liberal Hollywood. In the initial post-Frasier heyday, he described himself as a moderate Republican and reportedly toyed with running for government. But it’s hard to describe 2008’s An American Carol as bipartisan. A send-up of self-important Left-wing documentaries, it follows a schlubby filmmaker – a barely-disguised Michael Moore – who wants to abolish the annual July 4 celebrations. Before he can launch his nefarious anti-US plan, though, he is visited by three ghosts of great Americans past: a country singer, Gen George S Patton and George Washington. Grammer played Patton; Jon Voight was Washington. Whatever your political persuasion, it’s a difficult film to love.

“People are swift to judge, swift to react, swift to punish,” Grammer told The Guardian in 2018. He was referring to the backlash against the election of Donald Trump, but he could equally have been describing the Twitterstorm he inspired in 2015 when his wife, Kayte Walsh, posted a photo of the actor in a T-shirt made by the pro-choice group Abort73. “Would it bother us more if they used guns?” asked the t-shirt, and Walsh captioned the image “#standwithbabies”. It was hardly the move of a man with an eye on further ascending Hollywood’s greasy pole.

Grammer appears to have a dart-board approach to picking roles: the occasional bullseye, but more often than not thudding into plaster. Take 2020’s Money Plane. Considered generously, it’s a rickety remake of Ocean’s 11 on a passenger jet. Considered honestly, it’s a disaster that scarcely gathers enough B-movie vim to get off the ground.

In it, Grammer plays a cigar-chewing kingpin – “Darius Emmanuel Grouch III”, aka “The Rumble”, aka “The baddest motherf----r on the planet” – who tasks a professional thief (played by WWE wrestler Adam “Edge” Copeland) with stealing $40 million from a flying casino where interchangeably hammy bad guys place illogical bets of the Squid Game persuasion. (“Man vs cobra!” “Man vs piranha!” “Man vs… another man!”)

Grammer, at least, looks like he’s having fun. Whether barking out lines about “watch[ing] a man f--k an alligator” or going out in a Scarface-esque blaze of glory (“It’s Rumble time!”), he never seems abashed by the patent trash he’s keeping afloat. In fact, he was remarkably on-message when asked by The Ringer why he took on the role: “The film crossed my desk with an offer and it seemed like a fun, moustache-twirling kind of character that would not change my life, certainly, but put me in the sandbox with a new actor I like – Adam Copeland.”

For his part, Switzer was giddy at the prospect of the Frasier star playing the villain. “Who doesn’t love Kelsey Grammer? Frasier Crane is now Scarface – I can’t believe we did this!” (Asked whether there would be a sequel, he mused: “Money Sub. Money Copter. They didn’t have the money for a full plane, so they just had to use a little helicopter.”)

Will Grammer make an appearance? Don’t write it off. After all, alongside Father Christmas is Back, he has released another three films this year alone, including an organ transplant action-thriller, The God Committee, and a stoner-ish, Big Lebowski knock-off, The Space Between. And, of course, there is the long-rumoured, and now confirmed, Frasier “reboot”. For years, Grammer framed a return to Dr Crane as a matter of artistic integrity. “It would be quite a breathtaking failure to do it and not do it better than the primary show,” he told The Guardian in 2018.

So what’s changed? Quite possibly Grammer’s tangled divorce settlements have finally threatened to trip him up – and guff such as Money Plane can’t keep them at bay. “I have been divorced a few times,” he admitted to The National in 2014, “and that costs you a lot of money – the lawyers get it all in the end, don’t they?” While his net worth is currently estimated to be north of $60 million, he reportedly parted with at least $30m after his split with his ex-wife Camille in 2010 – the same year he put his Bel Air mansion on the market for $18m.

But perhaps that’s not all that motivates Grammer. As he reflected, the hardships of his childhood have impressed on him the value of graft, guts and gumption. “I think it’s your duty to overcome what you inherit in life,” he said to the Los Angeles Times in 1994. It’s the David Copperfield line: ‘Am I going to be the master of my fate, or its victim?’ I’m not going to be its victim, though. I’ve felt victimised, a lot.”

Besides, whether hamming it up as a mobster or dressing up as Santa Claus, Grammer is Hollywood’s most Telfon-coated actor: despite the ever-present stink of ordure, nothing seems to stick to him. As he tells his granddaughter in Father Christmas is Back: “People are going to say and do a lot of things in your life. Know what I say? Sod them.”