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Heartbreaking Facts About Kelsey Grammer
The following article includes references to alcoholism and substance abuse.
Kelsey Grammer has been one of television’s biggest stars for decades, first coming to fame in the role of psychiatrist Dr. Frasier Crane on beloved sitcom “Cheers.” That fame grew even larger when he reprised the character in a solo spinoff, “Frasier,” ultimately playing the role for 20 continuous years.
While Grammer has brought laughter to television viewers since the 1980s, his personal life has been characterized by tragedy. That has included the deaths of several loved ones, multiple divorces, a terrifying health crisis, and a well-publicized battle with substance abuse. That said, he’s emerged from these travails with the inner strength and wisdom that can only come about from experiencing adversity. Asked what he’d learned from all those tragic events, he told Vanity Fair, “That every one of us is going to experience some terrible loss. I just got a big dose. For every story you hear that’s tragic, there’s another that’s equally tragic or more so. I think you come to look at it as part of life.”
Kelsey Grammer’s early years were characterized by instability due to his parents divorcing when he was two. His mother took young Kelsey and his sister, Karen, to live with her parents. While there, the siblings were raised by their mother and their grandfather, Gordon Cranmer. Grammer and his grandfather were close because of their living situation. That tightly-knit relationship made it all the more painful when Grammer lost his grandfather to cancer when he was just 12 years old. “Yeah, it was Gordon that, you know, put the foundation of what it was to be a man,” Grammer recalled during a 2004 interview with broadcast journalist Katie Couric for NBC News.
Decades later, Grammer figured out a way to honor his late grandfather onscreen when he played a WWII-era soldier in the film “Murder Company.” “My granddad was in World War II and served, and he raised me,” Grammer revealed during an interview with Yahoo! Canada. “So I have a real energetic connection to him that carries on to this day.”
In April 1968, 13-year-old Kelsey Grammer experienced another tragedy. His father, Allen Grammer, had remarried and started a new family and was now living in St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. One night, he heard what sounded like a trespasser outside his home and went to investigate. His wife, Elizabeth, told People that she heard a gunshot and then her husband yelling, “Call the police! I’ve been shot!” She then heard gunfire a second time before finding her husband lying on the ground, dead.
The assailant was identified as Black taxi driver Arthur Bevan Niles, who’d previously captured the attention of police by covering his cab with anti-white statements, including, “Kill the white pigs.” Grammer, a magazine publisher who’d lived in St. Thomas since 1954, was described as “one of the island’s most controversial figures” due to sharing his sometimes unpopular opinions in his magazine. According to the report, Niles started a fire to deliberately lure Grammer out of his house with the intent to kill him.
“A man who was proven to be, at least in court, of questionable sanity, I suppose, lit a ring of fire around his house, and as my father came down to investigate what was going on, he … shot him several times and, uh, dad died,” Kelsey Grammer recalled while appearing on E! series “Celebrity Profile.”
Kelsey Grammer’s talent for acting emerged during his teenage years. After graduating from high school, he was accepted into the Juilliard School in New York City on a scholarship. The opportunity to study at such a prestigious institution — famous Juilliard alumni include the likes of legendary queen of soul Aretha Franklin, actor Jessica Chastain, late comedian Robin Williams, and many more — was something Grammer treasured. However, he struggled to afford living in New York.
He went for a time without a home, sleeping in Central Park when the weather allowed. “Only for a few weeks, really,” he recalled in an interview with “In Depth with Graham Bensinger.” “But I could sneak behind a certain bush and cover myself in newspaper, and I was fine,” he added. Grammer insisted he never felt he was in danger and compared the experience to the camping trips he went on as a child. “Whatever it was, there was always something that kept me safe.”
Despite the hardships he faced, Grammer maintained a resolute faith that he would eventually become a successful actor. “I had complete trust that I was going to make it,” Grammer told Us Weekly during a 1997 interview. “Not an arrogance, just a faith. I knew I was on the right path.”
Sadly, Grammer’s time at Juilliard was cut short when he was expelled after just two years because he demonstrated a “lack of focus.” One underlying reason behind that was the loss of his sister, Karen, when she was 18. She’d been waiting tables at a restaurant in Colorado Springs when she was abducted by three men who’d been casing the place in order to rob it. She was raped and murdered, with one of the men slitting her throat and then stabbing her. “That was the worst part of my life,” Grammer said, per People. As his first wife, Cerlette Lammé, told the magazine, he continued to be haunted by his sister’s brutal murder. “He still cries about her,” she said. “I don’t know if he blames himself, but sometimes I think he wishes he could have been there to save her.”
The man who murdered his sister was serial killer Freddie Glenn, who was subsequently jailed after embarking on a killing spree. Over the years, Grammer successfully blocked Glenn from being released whenever he came up for parole. Speaking with Vanity Fair, Grammer admitted he continued to feel guilt over his sister’s death, even though he knew intellectually that she shouldn’t. “It’s hard to explain. It’s not rational,” he said. “But it happens anyway. I know a lot of people who’ve lost their siblings and blame themselves.”
While the murder of his sister has continued to haunt Kelsey Grammer throughout his life, it wasn’t the only tragedy he faced with a sibling. In June of 1980, Grammer’s half-brothers, Billy and Stephen, were scuba diving off the coast of St. Thomas. At one point, Billy rose to the surface, but Stephen didn’t. Panicked that something had happened, Billy dove under the water to search for his brother. When he ascended to the surface too quickly, he suffered an embolism that killed him instantly. Stephen’s body was never recovered; their mother believed he was attacked by sharks, and his body was consumed.
Like others Grammer had gone through, those deaths left him with a lingering pain that he tries to forget about — but not always successfully. “I just put [that pain] where it is: in the past,” Grammer disclosed in an interview with inews.co.uk. “But it’s a pain that you can always stumble into again — it’s with you 24/7, especially in the case of tragic death, and there have been a few of those.”
As difficult as it had been, however, Grammer has been forced to carry that grief with him on his journey. “It’s just part of life,” he explained. “Maybe I learnt a little earlier than most, but it’s just the way it goes.”
Kelsey Grammer developed a taste for alcohol at a young age, taking his first drink at age nine. By the time he’d achieved stardom via his role as Dr. Frasier Crane on “Cheers,” his rampant substance abuse had made him a tabloid fixture. For example, Grammer made headlines in 1987 after being arrested for driving under the influence and then the following year when he was charged with possession of cocaine.
In 1990, an arrest warrant was issued for Grammer, because he hadn’t completed the mandatory 10 days of community service and an alcohol-abuse program resulting from those previous arrests. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and 10 days collecting trash from the side of a California highway. According to Ted Danson, Grammer’s “Cheers” co-star at the time, he and other cast members staged an intervention. “I remember the intervention only worked so-so,” Danson jokingly told Us Weekly. “But going to jail worked great.”
Looking back at those dark days, Grammer could see a straight line between his sister’s murder and his own substance abuse. I’ll speak to the straight of it,” Grammer told Vanity Fair. “That was the time when I could not forgive myself for my sister’s death.”
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
In 1992, Kelsey Grammer married Leigh-Anne Csuhany, a 22-year-old former exotic dancer he’d met in a strip club. This was far from a match made in heaven; less than a year after exchanging vows, Grammer sought to have the marriage annulled. At the time they split up, Csuhany was three months pregnant, and Grammer asked for custody of their unborn child. He then got a court order demanding that she leave his home; several days later, she was found in a Malibu hotel room after a reported suicide attempt, leaving a note that reportedly read, “[Kelsey] doesn’t love me.” She was placed under psychiatric observation and then terminated the pregnancy.
In his 1995 memoir, “So Far…,” Grammer revealed the marriage imploded because of Csuhany’s abusive treatment. “To be sure I’d never leave her, Leigh-Anne had to convince me I was nothing: unattractive, untalented, undeserving of love, and incapable of being loved by anyone but her,” he wrote. “She’d spit in my face, slap me, punch me, kick me, break glasses over my head, break windows, tear up pictures of my loved ones, threaten to kill me or herself.”
Csuhany refused to accept the annulment, which would essentially prevent her from making any claim to their shared property, as a divorce would. The marriage was eventually annulled; Grammer was ordered to pay Csuhany $7,500 in monthly spousal support.
During the first half of the 1990s, Kelsey Grammer’s substance abuse ebbed and flowed. In the fall of 1996, however, Grammer’s drinking and drug use had reached a critical mass. Shortly after NBC gifted him a brand-new Dodge V
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