John Mahoney, the beloved actor popularly remembered for his role on “Frasier,” and who died on Sunday, at the age of seventy-seven, was a performer whose raspy-voiced warmth, handsome face, easy laugh, and familiar presence created the illusion that he was your beloved old friend. When you saw him for the first time—for me, it was when he appeared in “Moonstruck,” in 1987—that presence radiated off the stage or screen.
There’s much to swoon over in “Moonstruck”—Nicolas Cage, Cher, the outbursts, the passion, the moon, the bakery, the brownstones, the Met, “Oh, Ma, I love him awful”—but the chief John Mahoney scene is as indelible as all the rest of it. He has a memorable role as a fellow-patron at a restaurant at which Olympia Dukakis’s character, the mother of Cher’s character, is a regular. Mahoney plays an aging lothario professor who often gets drinks thrown in his face by indignant younger women after a sleazy remark. Dukakis eats alone because her husband is having an affair; Mahoney ends up alone because he’s a scoundrel who can’t help offending his dates. One night, they eat together, and their scene of getting to know each other, in which she’s scolding, skeptical, sympathetic, and wise, and he’s chastened and increasingly smitten, is a marvel. He can’t take his eyes off her, and you can’t take your eyes off him. When he walks her home, swept off his feet by a white-haired woman almost a decade his senior, he conveys a feeling of mild magic, of floating on air—she’s both reformed him and declared victory over his kind, gently rebuffing him, and he’s delighted.
In “Say Anything,” in 1989, he played an ideal father—at first. Ione Skye plays his devoted, high-achieving daughter, and he’s a loving, supportive divorced dad who runs an elder-care home. You immediately believe the father-daughter bond, their mutual affection and respect, and you believe that he would be warily protective of her as she begins to date the ragtag aspiring kickboxer played by John Cusack. We spend much of the movie watching Skye and Cusack fall in love and Cusack trying to win over Mahoney, who makes us admire him despite his brusque protectiveness. He’s not an ogre—he’s the kind of parent many people aren’t lucky enough to have. I remember the joy in the theatre when Mahoney’s character, having learned that Skye has been accepted to an élite study program, drives along happily singing “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel. To me, that moment—that perfectly captured sing-in-the-car mood—is better than the famous Cusack boom-box scene. When Mahoney’s character is revealed to be an embezzler, stealing money from the elderly clients he cares for, it truly hurts. Cameron Crowe created a sympathetic character who’s also self-interested and deceptive—not an obvious monster but a villain nonetheless, and Mahoney made us believe all of it, including his incredulity at the loss of his daughter’s affection. One of the things that you take away from “Say Anything” is the quiet devastation that Mahoney’s character wreaks—a complex bad feeling that’s just as true to life as the soaring happiness of first love.
The only curveball of a role that I saw Mahoney play—in fact, it’s such a curveball that you might remember the performance but be surprised to remember that it was his—was in “Barton Fink,” the Coen brothers movie from 1989, in which he plays W. P. Mayhew, a white-suited Faulkneresque novelist turned Hollywood screenwriter. When Fink (played by John Turturro) lands in Hollywood and tries to make his way in screenwriting, too, Mayhew dispenses steely wisdom with a Southern drawl and staggers around with a bottle of whiskey. He’s a souse with writer’s block, yelling, “Mah honey!,” and failing to do much but philosophize, sing, and cash checks. The performance was wild, controlled, and tinged with pathos; it might have influenced your impression of Faulkner.
I went through a phase a while ago where I suddenly started watching lots of “Frasier” reruns, and consequently became mildly fixated on Mahoney. I can have complicated feelings about “Frasier,” except in my undying affection for Niles (David Hyde Pierce), whom I could watch forever. Mahoney, who played Martin Crane, Niles and Frasier’s father, was rightly seen as the heart of the show, but I sometimes felt that “Frasier” seemed to bank a bit too much on Mahoney’s natural warmth and was a bit too cavalier with his talents. Martin, a wounded ex-cop, was recognizably haimish: friendly, funny, just-folks, one of the guys, with a ratty armchair and a feisty dog, a fun contrast to Frasier and Niles’s fussy hauteur. Mahoney made a meal of the character and his zingers, but Martin could be sitcom-broad, with an exaggerated limp and a hot temper; he was written to be abrasive as well as lovable, and would throw surprisingly emotional fits, quick to pronounce that his sons had betrayed or disappointed him, which would then get resolved by the end of the half hour. I suspect that Martin was supposed to stand in for the audience in some way—the beer-drinking Joe America in front of the TV—and we were meant to laugh with him at Frasier and Niles, but the cartoonish parts of the character could undermine our ability to do that. The role seemed a bit too easy for him, somehow; I tried to reconcile my fondness for the actor, and for the better parts of his “Frasier” character, with my grouchiness about its excesses. On more than one occasion, I Googled him. Who was John Mahoney?
Well, John Mahoney was amazing. As you might have read last night or today, he had an extraordinary life. Born in Britain in 1940, he moved to Chicago and became a U.S. citizen, in 1959; he didn’t become a professional actor until he was in his forties. In the late nineteen-seventies, he joined the Steppenwolf Theatre, at the invitation of John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, and throughout his career, when he wasn’t working in Hollywood or on TV, he was onstage in Chicago, the city where he chose to spend much of his life. He was beloved by his peers at the Steppenwolf and in the wider theatre community; I wish I’d seen him onstage. He was famously private, I read, and this led me to hope and believe that there was happy fulfillment behind that privacy. Returning to my “Frasier” viewing after learning about who he was, it seemed to me that Mahoney both enjoyed the role and appreciated it. He didn’t participate in “Frasier” reunions, even at the request of Oprah. He was grateful, but he had moved on. He was an actor, and it was a great gig. Yesterday, Peri Gilpin, who played Roz, on “Frasier,” tweeted a photo of him singing at her wedding.
When I read, yesterday, that he died, I yelled, “No!,” like a weirdo. The impulse came from the same place the “Frasier”-era Googling came from: a deep fondness for an actor I didn’t know, born of his brilliance at creating the feeling that I did.
