The Actress Who Almost Played Niles Crane's Wife Maris On Frasier

In its eleven seasons on NBC, the "Cheers" spin-off "Frasier" managed to mostly be very different from its predecessor. Where "Cheers" largely took place in a sports bar in Boston, "Frasier" was as much about the home life of its eponymous psychiatrist, who moved across the country to Seattle to host a call-in radio show and take care of his elderly father after a hip injury made it impossible for him to live alone. When the show wasn't taking place in his palatial condo or the radio station where the show aired, Frasier and his even more effete brother Niles were sipping espressos in a fancy Seattle coffee house.

It's true, of course, that a number of the actors from "Cheers" showed up at various points on "Frasier," but often just for single-episode drop-ins that felt as much about how different Frasier the person was from them as it was about how different the show itself had become. But there was one way in which the two shows were very similar indeed. On "Cheers," a lengthy running gag involved the fact that barfly Norm Peterson would often talk about his wife Vera, but no one ever, y'know, saw her. On "Frasier," although Niles was extremely different from Norm, he too had a wife (Maris) that the audience never once laid eyes on. But if things had shaken out differently, we would have met Maris — and the producers had a specific actress in mind.

Maris Crane was a source of extremely effective comedy as early as the pilot episode of "Frasier," and it's almost too easy to just spend time listing out the various ways in which the character was described without being seen. Frasier noting in an early episode that Maris is best liked "from a distance. You know, the way you like the sun. Maris is like the sun ... except without the warmth." We learn that she's the heiress to a urinal-cake fortune. We also know (courtesy of Niles' cop dad Martin) that Maris is "thin ... very thin. And Caucasian ...very Caucasian."

The number of delightful excuses for why Niles always spends time with Frasier without his wife in the early seasons were always pretty brilliant, from Niles recounting an experience in which Maris asked for a goose near an Italian soccer team and "perhaps inevitably, tragedy ensued" to him noting that she once "slumped down on the bed in her half-slip and sighed." With those descriptions in mind, it makes sense that character actress Julia Duffy threw her hat in the ring early in the show's run to play Maris.

According to a massive and fascinating oral history of "Frasier" published a few years ago by Vanity Fair, one of the show's creators noted that Duffy's agent had contacted the show's writers about having her appear as Maris. As Peter Casey recalls in that oral history, "Somewhere in the first season, Julia Duffy's agent ... said she'd love to play Maris. But by that point, we felt it was better if she was left unseen. It was much funnier adding new and outrageous descriptions."

Casey is no doubt correct; it's a testament to the writing staff over the course of 11 seasons that they were able to create such a vivid picture of a person we never saw but felt we knew all too well. But it's also kind of wild to consider the character of Maris and realize that, honestly, Duffy would have been pretty close to perfect as Maris if they'd ever decided to put her onscreen.

Duffy, a TV stalwart since the 1970s, was best known at the time for having been a regular on the CBS sitcom "Newhart" (the one in which the late comic Bob Newhart runs a bed-and-breakfast, not the one in which he played a psychiatrist himself). And who did Duffy play on "Newhart"? Oh, just a self-obsessed, haughty heiress whose cousin worked at the B&B. If anything, you could say the casting would be too easy of a slam-dunk because of how well known Duffy was (having netted a handful of Emmy nominations for her work on "Newhart") and how it could have almost been typecasting.

It's not that Duffy couldn't have played Maris; from a visual standpoint, few people better fit the bill. But just as it was always funnier for the writers on "Cheers" to think of ways to describe Norm's wife Vera without actually showing her too often, it was a lot funnier for the "Frasier" writers to think of new ways to keep Maris off-screen, whether because she refuses to leave her bedroom, because she's in a hyperbaric chamber, or she's dispatched her swordsman lover to deal with Niles instead. In fact, "Frasier" actually held the line better than "Cheers." The latter show technically did show us Vera during a season-five Thanksgiving episode that devolves into a food fight and climaxes with Vera being pied in the face just as she enters the frame.

It's good to know that someone could have played Maris Crane, of course, but it's just as good to know that the show's producers and writers never had to put words into her mouth. That might have been one challenge too impossible to resolve.