Niles Crane
fictional character from Frasier
Niles Crane (born 1957) is a fictional character on the American sitcom Frasier, a spin-off of the television show Cheers. He was portrayed by David Hyde Pierce. Niles is the younger brother of Frasier Crane (played by Kelsey Grammer).
Pierce was hired because Frasier producers saw his headshot and commented on how much he looked like a young Grammer. Unlike Frasier, part of whose background comes from Cheers, Niles's background is established over the course of Frasier.
Pierce has said that his character was originally explained to him as "what Frasier would be if he had never gone to Boston and never been exposed to the people at Cheers." Anita Gates of The New York Times wrote in 1998 that "the difference between the brothers is that Frasier knows they're being pretentious; Niles honestly doesn't."
Background
Niles was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1957–1959 (depending on different timelines), to Hester Crane, a psychiatrist, and Martin Crane, a police officer. Like his older brother Frasier, Niles was named for one of his mother's lab rats. Also like Frasier, Niles was an unusually sensitive child and a frequent target for bullies. As a result, he was quite close to his older brother, and at the same time fiercely competitive with him. Like Frasier, Niles prefers fine arts, music, and intellectual pursuits to physical activities like sports.
“Niles Crane” enters the record as fictional character from Frasier. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Niles, Crane and fictional can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Niles Crane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.