Quiet” is not really a word you would associate with Daphne Moon. When you think of Jane Leeves’s character in Frasier, you think of a woman of eccentricity and colour, possibly shouting “Doctor Crane!” or drawling “I’m a little bit psychic”, in that elastic Mancunian accent of hers. Today, though, Leeves, 65, speaks (sans accent) with a kind of hushed serenity. I shake her hand in the lounge of a West London hotel in a state of fluster, having forgotten my interview notes. “Notes, schmotes,” she says, waving a hand.
Leeves spent 11 years playing Daphne, living in the chic Seattle apartment of radio psychiatrist Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) as a live-in physiotherapist to his blue-collar dad Martin (John Mahoney). Having spun off from the long-running sitcom phenomenon Cheers, Frasier shifted Grammer’s haughty shrink from a Boston dive bar to urban Seattle, in the process creating one of the biggest sitcoms in TV history – an awards juggernaut (with 37 Emmy wins) that holds up astonishingly well decades later. In Daphne’s slow-burn will-they-won’t-they relationship with Frasier’s effete brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), Leeves was at the centre of one of TV’s great love stories. She could more or less write the book on Frasier – which is exactly what she’s done.
