At first glance, Kelsey Grammer has a lot in common with Frasier Crane, the stuffy psychiatrist he's best known for playing. With a limitless vocabulary and quick wit, Grammer conjures up the character easily. He lengthens his neck, lifts his chin, adds a dash of pomposity, and suddenly he's belting out a preposterous line from the landmark sitcom. "Did no one hear me say that I bought a Hungarian goose?" he booms in a voice laced with self-importance.

The same bravado and wit that earned Grammer four Emmys for Frasier will come in handy when he takes on the role of narcissistic news anchor Chuck Darling in the new sitcom Back to You. But, Grammer says, in some ways the Scotch-sipping Darling, who admits he is "chock-full of Botox" in the show's first episode, and Frasier are of a different breed. "Chuck's ego is much more apparent," Grammer says. While Frasier was all brain, Chuck is mostly gut and, Grammer jokes, a body part further south.

Grammer, 52, has made even the most scornful of his characters lovable by infusing them with a childlike quality. That's because in real life, "he is such a little boy. Oh, that is so true," says David Hyde Pierce, who played Frasier's brother, Niles. "That's what makes him so eminently watchable. Like a little kid, at the bottom of everything else, he's just having such a good time." That Grammer has maintained a youthful enthusiasm for life is all the more remarkable given the struggles he's faced, beginning in his childhood. His own history is more the stuff of drama than comedy.

Grammer's parents divorced when he was two, and Kelsey lived with his mother and grandparents in New Jersey, Florida and, later, New York. His father, who owned a bar and grill on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, was killed when Grammer was 13. When he was 20, his younger sister Karen was raped and murdered in Colorado. Kelsey had to identify her body. Five years later, his two half-brothers died while scuba diving.

Grammer is the first to admit that comedy saved him from the sadness. "I always had a predisposition towards seeing the comical in any situation," he says. "It was a place where I felt alive. It gave me something to focus on and a sense of being useful."

The TV comic has long been able to get laughs from the simple turn of a phrase or the slow turn of his head. His first audience was his mum. When Kelsey at the age of six belched at the dinner table, she would tell him to "swallow your burps". One day, after a particularly loud emission, he beat her to the punch. "Chew before you swallow," he said.

He was 12 when his maternal grandfather, Gordon, died – making Kelsey the "titular head of the household without the authority". Again, humour got him through. "I used that gift to help buoy my mum's spirits when things weren't going so well," he says. "She was phlegmatic and a little inscrutable. I would dig at it until I got her to smile." As a surfer growing up in Florida with no surfer girl, the introverted and bookish Grammer added his ability to make others laugh to his social arsenal. "I didn't think I was cute enough to score without some backup," he says.

He discovered acting at the age of 16, when he appeared in Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes at Fort Lauderdale's Pine Crest School. He went on to Juilliard in 1973 but was kicked out after two years for poor attendance. It was the first sign that his personal losses would haunt him for years to come.

"The grief I carried was debilitating, and I basically tried to drown it with booze for a long time," he says. In 1990 he was sentenced to 30 days in jail (he served 11) for failing to complete a mandatory driver's education class having been found guilty of driving under the influence. When, in 1996, he flipped his Dodge Viper and ended up in the Betty Ford Center, he decided to try to change. "My life has undergone a renewal of faith and a release from grief, which actually has been really wonderful," he says today. "This has only taken place within the last few years."

Grammer's professional career began to take off in 1984, when Mandy Patinkin, who appeared with him in the musical Sunday in the Park with George, recommended Grammer to a casting director looking for funny leading men for Cheers. For his audition, Grammer pulled out a pair of yellow golf pants, donned a blue blazer and, with his preppy attire, became Dr Frasier Crane.

Cheers cocreator James Burrows recalls his initial reaction: "Before he said a line, we saw that face and started laughing. It's cherubic. He looked like what we had envisioned for Frasier."

Dr Crane was supposed to be a brainy new love interest for Diane Chambers (Shelley Long), to create tension with Ted Danson's Sam Malone. But the audience loved Frasier and Diane's repartee. "We knew right then and there we had to keep this guy around," Burrows says.

When it came time to create a spin-off, in 1993, Frasier was an obvious choice for the central character. He was often the butt of the joke. "I think we all understand what it is to feel we're just not good enough," Grammer says. "Frasier was so tortured and yet so caring. He really wanted to do the world some good."

On Frasier, Grammer paid homage to the comedy greats. "In one scene, you can identify James Mason, Jackie Gleason, Bette Davis and Sylvester the Cat," says Hyde Pierce, "and yet it's all Frasier." The droll subtleties of Jack Benny appealed to him: the slow turn, the hand on the cheek, the roll of the eyes and the deadpan delivery. "I borrow a lot of Jack, but I have done some Lucy, too," Grammer says. "Lucy went big. Frasier goes big without apology."

Comedians use the same tricks whether they're male or female, Grammer says. "Phyllis Diller is Bob Hope."

But not everybody is Kelsey Grammer. "He can play supercilious, highfalutin, obnoxious, and he makes it funny," Burrows says. "He can go over the top and make it believable. It's in the genes. Few actors can do that."

Grammer mastered playing a frustrated romantic in part because, in his personal life, he had his share of failed relationships. He has been married three times, once briefly to a stripper.

In 1996 he met Camille Donatucci "She looks like the classic package any guy would want, but there's a lot of depth and character to her," he says. They have been married since August 1997.

Does she still laugh at his jokes? "Sometimes, and sometimes she finds me annoying. This is my adult relationship," he concedes. They have two children, daughter Mason, five, and son Jude, three. (Grammer has two other daughters: Spencer, 23, from his first marriage, and Greer, 15, from his relationship with a make-up artist. He and Greer no longer see each other. "Maybe someday we will, but at this point, that's not the way it works," he says.)

When the creators of Back to You approached Grammer, who hadn't been on a series for a few years, and offered him the leading role, he thought, What the hell. But it's not as though he needs the money. "It's just that if you grow up like I did where something might happen, anything's possible," he says. "I like to work, and I like to provide for my family."

At the centre of the show is a tension created by Grammer and Patricia Heaton, who plays his coanchor, Kelly Carr. In the pilot, Chuck Darling does his voice exercises before going on the air, much to the annoyance of Heaton's character, who calls him a "preening gasbag".

"Chuck will be frustrated with her because she'll probably be right about almost everything, which has been my experience in marriage," Grammer says. The show will also offer a surprise twist for Chuck, a plotline involving family complications that, Grammer admits, hits close to home. "I have a lot of grist to bring to the mill," he says.

Which is to say that after 20 years in Hollywood, Grammer is right back where he belongs: making himself and everyone else laugh by playing a character trying to find his way through the angst of everyday relationships and life.