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.