You know, part of the reason I started Celebrating the Living was that I was tired of finding out how awesome people were when I was writing their obituaries. That gets frustrating, because you feel as though you’ve missed out on giving people their due when they were around to notice it. And, yes, I’m perfectly aware that no one I’ve written about for the column is aware that I wrote about them unless they’re keeping it quiet. (If anyone knows of a person from Celebrating the Living who’s read the article, would you let me know? It would help my conviction that no one I don’t know reads it.) The problem, of course, is that there are just too many celebrities. I’m never going to get to all of them, even with my unspoken “Don’t write about them if you hear they’re a terrible person” policy. So there will always be days like today and people like John Mahoney.

I found out today that he was actually evacuated from Manchester to Blackpool as a child to escape Luftwaffe bombing. That his older sister was a war bride, and she sponsored his immigration to the US. (Chain migration, y’all!) That he was an English professor at Western Illinois University. Then he became a medical journalist. That he didn’t act professionally until he was 37. That he was offered other TV work after Frasier and chose not to do it because he could afford to go back to his first love, the stage. (Though he guested, and he did a season of In Treatment, he never took a regular series role again.) That, indeed, he was considered one of the leading lights of the Chicago theatrical scene for some time.

The three roles that are the first to spring to mind for me are all ones where he’s either an actual father or a father figure. Of course we all know him as Martin Crane, father of Frasier and Niles. And of course a lot of us know him as James Court, father of Diane in Say Anything . . . . But I’m probably one of the few people for whom the third role in which I think of him is Jack in The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy. He plays the elderly father figure of a number of the characters, the owner of a local restaurant who’s in a long-term loving relationship that, in my opinion, proves to the other characters that such a thing is even possible.

But you may think of Eight Men Out or The Iron Giant or the Disney Atlantis movies or his work with the Coens or Moonstruck or, or, or. He did a lot of work, especially for someone whose preference was the stage. In 2015, he even appeared on an episode of the World War II-set British show Foyle’s War, his last TV role. He was a fine, busy actor, and I suspect that if you ask any group of people to name three roles of his, you’re going to get a lot of answers beyond Frasier. Including an episode of Cheers where he played a jingle writer.

It’s funny, though, because while those two main roles were as dads, neither one was really a great dad. One was frankly kind of lousy at it and one was merely too good to be true. It’s only the third, that obscure movie, where I remember his as being good at it, and even there, he seems to have been as much frustrated as anything else. Of course, I haven’t watched that movie in a long time, because I’ve never gotten around to upgrading it from VHS. Maybe that’s something I should get around to, to make up for never having gotten around to John Mahoney while he was alive.