Kelsey Grammer

Born: 21st February 1955
Where: St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, USA

The actor is best remembered for the Emmy-award winning role of Dr Frasier Crane in the long-running comedy Frasier.

At the cinema, he has appeared as diverse as Agent Banks in the comedy The Big Empty to Beast in the X-Men.

On a darker note, his father was murdered in the Virgin Islands; his sister was murdered after leaving a restaurant in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and his brother was killed in a shark attack.

The son of a singer and a bar owner and musician, Grammer's parents divorced when he was young and he went to live with his mother.

In 1968, when Grammer was thirteen, his father, whom he had only seen twice since his parents' divorce, was murdered on the front lawn of his home in the US Virgin Islands.

Unbelievably, seven years later his sister was raped and murdered after being abducted outside a Red Lobster restaurant in Colorado Springs, Colorado where her boyfriend worked.

Grammer, who was 20 at the time and enrolled in the Juilliard acting program, stopped attending classes and was asked to leave, citing a lack of focus.

In 1980, his twin half-brothers were killed in a SCUBA diving accident.

Grammer threw himself into his work, performing with the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego for three years in the late 1970s before returning to New York where he made his daytime TV debut on the soap Another World.

His big break came in 1984 when he was cast as the psychiatrist fiancé of Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) in the hit sitcom Cheers.

This resulted in a six-episode stint that spanned nearly two decades.

In the show he played a shrink who outwardly seems adjusted, but is actually in desperate need of some intense psychotherapy himself.

When the last call was finally sounded at Cheers in 1993, Grammer's character was the natural choice for a spin-off and Frasier went on to become a ratings winner and the only sitcom to win five consecutive Best Comedy Series Emmy Awards.

On the big screen, he made his debut in the little seen comedy Galaxies Are Colliding and later played Lt Cmdr Thomas 'Tom' Dodge in Down Periscope.

Grammer's smooth, deep voice made him popular for voiceover work such as Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons, winning an Emmy for his work in the episode The Italian Bob.

He also supplied the voices for Stinky Pete the Prospector in Toy Story 2, Vladimir in the Fox animated movie Anastasia, Zozi the Bear in the subsequently-produced prequel Bartok the Magnificent, and the title character in the short-lived animated series Gary the Rat.

Off-screen Grammer's colourful private life has kept in the gossip pages with early marriages to a dance instructor and a stripper.

In 2006, he appeared as Dr Hank McCoy/The Beast in X-Men: The Last Stand and went on to voice Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons Movie.