Daphne & Me

“Oh, hello! Caught me with me hand in the biscuit tin!” With one iconic line, Daphne Moon burst onto the set of Frasier and Jane Leeves’s life changed forever. A former ballerina from a small English town that David Hyde Pierce lovingly nicknamed “Muffin-on-Poot,” Leeves perfectly embodied her character—a live-in physical therapist for Frasier Crane’s father and a quirky, down-to-earth foil to pompous Frasier and his equally pretentious brother, Niles. In Daphne & Me , Leeves offers a surprising, behind-the-scenes look at Frasier , filled with unexpected stories from the show’s eleven seasons and beyond. She opens the door to the fabled—and shockingly cramped—greenroom, where John Mahoney started each morning with a cup of coffee while reading the newspaper, and where the tight quarters quickly bonded the cast into a family. (Nothing brings people together like sharing a bathroom.) She recounts the times Kelsey Grammer broke his scene-mates by delivering lines in a spot-on Bette Davis impression, and how Moose—the talented terrier who starred as Eddie—was a holy terror on set and upstaged the entire cast with his popularity, even flying in first class. As Daphne and Niles were falling head over heels for each other in a great television romance, Leeves was finding her true love on the Paramount lot, too, and when she started a family of her own, it was Peri Gilpin who held her hand in the hospital. Written with Leeves’s daughter Isabella, Daphne & Me is the story of a young woman taking a risk, discovering herself, and finding a family on and off screen, and a love letter to one of the most successful sitcoms of all time.