John Mahoney (1940-2018) *77

was an English-American actor of stage, film, and television.

Born in Bispham, Blackpool, Lancashire, England, Mahoney started his career on the stage in 1977, and moved into film in 1980. He was best known for playing the blue-collar patriarch Martin Crane in the American sitcom Frasier, which aired on NBC from 1993 to 2004. In addition to his film and television work, Mahoney also worked as a voice actor and was particularly passionate about his stage work on Broadway and in Chicago theatre. Mahoney was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England on June 20, 1940 as the seventh of eight children in an Irish Catholic family.

The family had been evacuated to Blackpool from the Mahoneys' home city of Manchester, when it was heavily bombed during the Second World War. He started school at St Joseph's College, Blackpool. After the war, the family moved back to Manchester. Mahoney grew up in the Withington area of the city and discovered acting at the Stretford Children's Theatre. His Irish father Reg was a baker who played classical piano, and his mother Margaret was a housewife who loved reading. His parents' marriage was not happy and they either would not speak to each other or have heated arguments. The family situation, combined with the war, fueled Mahoney's interest in acting and he vowed to leave Manchester.

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. After graduating from Quincy, 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 1970s.

Post a comment / Comments guidelines