At one of the lowest points in Kelsey Grammer’s life, one thought helped him keep going: he could not let down his late sister.
He wrote about it in Karen: A Brother Remembers, an ode to his sister who was murdered in 1975, an event that reshaped Grammer's life when he was a 20-year-old acting student. In the book, published last year, Grammer puts the years that followed in direct terms. “How did I survive? Well, I just wouldn’t quit; I didn’t want to let Karen down.”
Nearly five decades later, it remains core to his being, he tells The National.
“Don’t quit, just don’t quit,” Grammer says. “Keep trying, keep looking, keep fighting. Never stop learning. Be engaged in history, be engaged in the human experience.
“There are many lessons I've learnt, but the most important was put best by Michael McDonald in the song One by One: You'll always have a chance to give up, so why do it now?”
Grammer is 71, with a career that has carried him from Shakespeare at Juilliard to one of the most famous comic roles in American television. Frasier Crane made him a household name on Cheers and Frasier, giving him decades inside a character whose polish often hid loneliness, vanity and private wounds.
That work drew from a life that had already been marked by struggle.
“Life experience is the textbook for us to become actors,” he says. “If you don’t have it, you’re not going to be a very good actor. You have to have an understanding of what it means to be a human being.”
But reflecting now, he believes he spent too long thinking about the day his sister died, and too little thinking about the life she lived. He told People he wanted to “breathe life into her” again. In another interview, he told Diane Sawyer his hope was that others might return to the person they lost, rather than remain fixed on the day of loss.
That understanding carries into his acting, especially with roles drawn from real lives. Historical figures often arrive as faded effigies, the person they represented long out of view.
“We have a great job as people in this position,” Grammer says. “Suddenly we go: 'Oh, wait a minute, that guy on a monument is a person. He’s alive, he’s got fingers, he feels things, he loves, he wants success, he didn’t get it, he fights for something.'”
In Young Washington, that figure is George Washington before the presidency, the Revolutionary War and the national mythology that later gathered around him. Grammer plays Lord Thomas Fairfax, an older figure in Washington’s early life, as the film returns to a young man still being formed by ambition, failure, war and love.
The actor says he is drawn to the years before his legend took over, when his fate was still unformed. And in the character's indefatigability, he sees the same mantra he's followed himself.
“George Washington, from his earliest days, was a young man of courage who resolved to get through almost anything to become who he was going to become,” Grammer says. “He didn’t abandon that.”
“When we as a country can understand where we come from, when we understand that that’s the founder, that’s the legacy we’ve been given by George Washington – somebody who doesn’t quit,” Grammer says.
Young Washington arrives in cinemas on July 3, a day before America marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence.
And while the ideals written in that document remain integral, the lives of the men who wrote them offer just as many lessons, Grammer believes.
“Of all the great virtues, courage is certainly the greatest,” Grammer says. “And he was a man who lived in that place, in the face of failure, in the face of difficulty, in the face of challenges, in the face of losing love, and any number of things that, actually, we all face.
“We have an opportunity to point at a guy who is honoured in a giant monument in Washington, but he looms that large in our current manifestation. The future wisdom of this country lives in the acts and the words of our founders, and this is a great opportunity to understand that.”
