O Happy Man. John Mahoney rises with a grin and a greeting, offers his hand and pretty soon he's waxing about Ireland and the west coast and how he's the luckiest guy in the world, how virtually everything he wanted in life has come to him in blessed abundance. All the while you are searching his eyes and rifling his words. Where's crusty old Marty Crane? Is this the right guy?
John Mahoney has one of those faces, a Zelig-like presence, which just keeps recurring in quality work. When he's not the fulcrum of common sense in the Coward-like constructs of Frasier he is busy putting together an astonishing body of movie and stage work.
A top-of-the-head listing of his recent silver screen stuff - She's the One, Primal Fear, The American President, Tin Men, Barton Fink, In the Line of Fire, The Hudsucker Proxy and so on. Better still, playing Marty Crane on the incredibly successful Frasier series hasn't restricted him at all. He's just finished shooting an independent movie called The Broken Hearts Club in which he plays a gay west Hollywood nightclub owner. Mahoney got to sing two songs in drag and when we meet he's just off to the west coast to shoot another indie movie, this time about the aftermath of the death of James Dean.
On top of that is his long association with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre - one of the world's great playhouses - and his current succes d'estime playing James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night - Eugene O' Neill's unsparing epic of guilt and recrimination which comes to the Galway Arts Festival from Chicago trailing a slipstream of rave reviews.
It is summer in Chicago - the city which Mahoney calls home and where he lives for six months of every year. Hollywood has spurred no delusions in him and when the work is finished he retreats to the sanity of leafy Oak Park - the place that Hemingway fled and Frank Lloyd Wright matured in.
A quick fast-forward through Mahoney's early years. Born in Manchester in 1940 he was raised with seven siblings in the postwar gloom of that ruined city. His father, a baker, led the family to the US in 1951, but failed in business there and led them home again. That short trip was an epiphany.
"I remember it as the discovery of colour. For me it's like in the Wizard of Oz when all the Kansas scenes are in black and white and suddenly Oz bursts out in brilliant Technicolor. Manchester with its ration books and coupons, it was all grey and black. America was just colour everywhere, big, bright skies. I knew it was where I had to be."
He struck out for his new life when he was 19 and entered the US army where, not wanting "to be a foreigner here all my life", he worked steadily on losing his accent. In three years he picked up a comicly eclectic accent drawn from the various members of his platoon.
He went to college and financed his education by working as a hospital orderly. Leaving with a Masters he was distressed to discover that he was an enthusiastic but poor teacher. He surveyed his resources, six years of hospital work and an English degree, and took the avenue availed off by thousands of people who have failed at higher callings. He became a journalist.
By the time he was 37 he was the associate editor of a health magazine with an office and a revolving chair of his own and a life which seemed to lose a little of its colour every day.
Another epiphany. He was at home visiting and went to the Royal Exchange in Manchester where he saw Albert Finney and Leo McKern doing Uncle Vanya. It exploded in his head.
"I just said: `I want to do that'. Then I saw Peter Hall's production of Jumpers in the National Theatre. My mind was just a swirl. I didn't want to be an old man thinking `why didn't I try it?'. So I wrote to Sir Peter Hall and told him I'd just seen Jumpers and I was inspired by it and I was going to pursue acting. He wrote back a nice letter thanking me and encouraging me. I took that as an official endorsement."
Years later, when Mahoney had made a name for himself, the Peter Hall diaries were published. Mahoney's curiosity was pricked.
"I wanted to know what Sir Peter Hall was doing the day he wrote back to me. I looked it up. On the day he wrote to me he'd been to hospital to have a detached retina sewn back on, there was a strike at the National Theatre and they were locked out, rehearsing in the courtyard, and somehow he took the time to write me this letter, so I wrote to him again to thank him again."
Encouraged by Hall and inspired by Finney, he had returned to Chicago and enrolled in acting classes in the St Nicholas Theatre. There he began a series of associations which have shaped his career almost as much as his talent has.
The St Nicholas was run by David Mamet and William H. Macy (Fargo, Magnolia) and they were the first of that generation in Chicago to go on and make extraordinary careers for themselves.
Mahoney tells a story about his first acting part. Mamet cast him straight out of acting class in a small role in The Water Engine. The show was a success and when it came time for the run to be extended one of the lead actors had another commitment. The manager of the theatre came to Mahoney with a proposition.
"He said I could have a bigger part but that meant I would have to join Equity. I said that was fine - this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. He said there was something else. I asked what. He said that the theatre hadn't the money to pay me. The idea was that because I was in Equity they would have to give me a cheque each week. As they had no money I would have to sign it back over to them. So I agreed."
At the end of the first week the manager came to him and handed him a cheque which Mahoney, now holding all the aces, immediately pocketed.
"He said: `Aren't you forgetting something John?' I said: `No. Look, I'm sorry I lied to you but this is my living. I need this money. I've earned it and I'm not giving it back."
The theatre manager took the incident with good grace, which is fortunate, as Peter Schneider is now head of Disney, for whom Mahoney has done voice work on three animated movies over the past few years. "When we were doing Antz, Peter came down and he was teasing me about robbing him of his cheque. I had to say that it hadn't hurt his career much."
From the St Nicholas he got a part in an early Steppenwolf production of Philadelphia Here I Come, at a time when the company was still operating from a church basement in Highland Park in north Chicago. He did Waiting for Leftie next and by then had struck up a firm friendship with John Malkovich. When Steppenwolf expanded, each member was asked to introduce somebody else into the group. Malkovich introduced Mahoney and, within seven months of quitting journalism, Mahoney found himself part of one of the most influential theatre groups of the past 50 years.
"It was incredible. No money of course. I had to sell furniture, live in the YMCA, sold the records, the books, everything. In the early Steppenwolf days it was like that. We did Balm in Gilead which transferred to Broadway and won every award known to man. It established careers for John (Malkovich), Gary (Sinise), Laurie (Metcalfe) and Glenn (Headley) and we were all taking home $75 a week. Later, when I started making money, I wandered the second-hand stores of Chicago trying to get back everything I had to sell."
Steppenwolf was a gilt-edged calling card though. "I got offered such stuff. People said: `Oh you make great choices'. I was just lucky I won a Tony award early on and people thought `ooh he wouldn't care to be in Porky's 5'. How would they know? I had no money. So the directors who sought me out were Levinson, Polanski, Costa Gavras, those guys. They sought me out even though I'd have entertained anything at one point."
Years later, his arrival on Frasier was typically serendipitous. In the final year of Cheers, Mahoney appeared in an episode where the bar hired a piano player to write a commercial jingle. The guy who was originally supposed to play the piano player just lost his nerve and walked off the set. Somebody suggested John Mahoney as they'd seen him on Broadway playing the piano while winning his Tony in John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves.