John Mahoney

 John Mahoney (June 20, 1940 – February 4, 2018)

Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England, Mahoney started his career on the stage in 1977 and moved into film in 1980. He played Martin Crane in the American sitcom Frasier on NBC from 1993 to 2004. He also worked as a voice actor, and performed on Broadway and in Chicago theater. Mahoney moved to the United States as a young man when his older sister, Vera, a war bride living in rural Illinois, agreed to sponsor him. He studied at Quincy University, Illinois, before joining the United States Army to speed up the U.S. citizenship process; he received citizenship in 1959. He lived in Macomb, Illinois, and taught English at Western Illinois University in the early 1970s, before settling in Forest Park, Illinois, and later in Oak Park, Illinois. He served as editor of a medical journal through much of the decade. Dissatisfied with his career, Mahoney took acting classes at St. Nicholas Theatre, which inspired him to quit his day job and pursue acting full-time, and after a stage production in 1977, John Malkovich encouraged him to join Steppenwolf Theatre. He did so and went on to win the Clarence Derwent Award as Most Promising Male Newcomer.

He won Broadway's Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves. Mahoney's first major film role was in the 1987 Barry Levinson film Tin Men. He went on to have prominent roles in a number of acclaimed films throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, including Eight Men Out, Say Anything..., In the Line of Fire, Reality Bites, and The American President. He appeared in two Coen brothers films, Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy. Mahoney appeared in Frasier from its inception in 1993 until the final episode in 2004; Mahoney received two Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations for this role.

In 2007, Mahoney provided the voice of Dr. Robert Terwilliger, Sr. (Sideshow Bob's father) in The Simpsons episode "Funeral for a Fiend." This reunited him with his Frasier co-stars Kelsey Grammer (Sideshow Bob) and David Hyde Pierce (Cecil, Sideshow Bob's brother). Mahoney died on February 4, 2018 while in hospice care in Chicago, at the age of 77 .