Kelsey Grammer remembers his Cheers co-star Kirstie Alley as “one of the funniest people” he’s ever known” and someone who always made him laugh.
They worked on the hit NBC show together for six seasons in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alley took over as the main actress after Shelley Long left the show in 1987. Sam Malone, played by Ted Danson, was in love with Rebecca Howe, who played the bar’s manager.
I always felt close to her. She was very supportive of me back in Cheers days when I was having a bit of an issue with drugs and the law, so to speak,
Grammer says before chuckling.
But other than that, I just got a kick out of her.
Kelsey Grammer joined the cast at the start of the third season, and he says he knew right away that adding Alley was a good thing.
When she joined Cheers, I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is a show. It’s gonna become more popular than it was before,’
Grammer says.
She came in, and she had such energy and such beauty as well, natural qualities that made her a lovely person as well as a nice girl to look at, you know, which was still something that we cared about then. Without embarrassment, yeah, I thought she was a really beautiful woman and she was delightful along with it. And that’s a rare combination. And she just always, always kept things alive and bubbly and creative.
Grammer laughs as he talks about the one time he will always remember with Alley.
She once said to me… oh gosh, it’s inappropriate,
he says,
but she said that she dedicated herself to spending as much money on flowers each week once she stopped doing something else that wasn’t so good for her.
In fact, after its first season, the show did very well. It was one of the original “Must-See” shows on NBC, which brought in millions of viewers every week.
Grammer’s most recent job is hosting Stage Access, a streaming service for the performing arts. He thinks that people liked Cheers for a lot of different reasons.
It was a celebration of the chosen family you have and it happened to be set in a bar, which was a familiar scene for a lot of Americans at the time,
he says.
It was good natured, though, and it was headed by Ted Danson — such an affable guy.
When that show ended, Grammer kept playing Dr. Frasier Crane on a show called Frasier, which was a spinoff of Cheers. The well-liked show ran for 11 seasons, from 1993 to 2004, which is the same amount of time as Cheers.
He is going to play the character again in a revival that is now looking for actors. The first practice will take place on February 1. The actor who was the first to be nominated for an Emmy for playing the same character on three different shows (Frasier, Cheers, and another TV comedy called Wings) found it easy to play Frasier again. He received four awards for his role as the lead actor in the television series Frasier.
He’s like putting on a favorite old jacket, you know, it’s really easy for me to slide back into it,
the Tony winner says.
It was a fully fleshed out characterization on my part, and I walked a lot of the same streets with him, you know, for a long time. So he’s always in there somewhere, ready to pop out.
Before that, Grammer can be seen with his daughter Spencer in the Lifetime Christmas movie The 12 Days of Christmas Eve and in the Prime Video movie Christmas in Paradise. He also hosts the holiday content on Stage Access.
