Among the thousands of people who died in the 9/11 attacks was David Angell, a TV writer and producer Frasier star Jane Leeves recently hailed as a “remarkable man” who “quietly went about the business of bettering so many lives.”
Angell, who co-created Frasier with Peter Casey and David Lee, and Lynn Angell, his wife, died aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which terrorists hijacked and flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
And Leeves praised both the Angells on the October 27 episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast Dinner’s On Me. “I wanted people to know how magnificent these people were. They truly were magnificent.” she told Ferguson.
Angell was a “remarkable man” of “quiet, stealth humor,” said Leeves, who portrayed Daphne Moon on Frasier. “He looked very professorial [with] loafers and shirts, and then he would quietly say something that was just the funniest thing you’d ever heard. But also, they quietly went about the business of bettering so many lives, which we didn’t know anything about until they were gone.”
Before she awoke to the news of the attacks, Leeves and the rest of the Frasier cast and crew were prepared to shoot an episode of the sitcom the night of September 11, 2001. That morning, Leeves’ husband, Marshall Coben, told her they should prepare for the possibility of knowing someone who’d died. Later that day, it was Coben who let Leeves know David and Lynn had been killed. It was one of the moments in which “breath leaves your body, and you just fall to pieces,” Leeves told Ferguson.
Ultimately, it was Angell’s work on the show that inspired everyone to resume filming when the time was right. “David Hyde Pierce [who played Dr. Niles Crane] said, ‘I want everyone, crew and everyone, to come to the set because I’ve had a letter from a dear friend of mine,’” Leeves recalled on the podcast. “The letter, in essence, said, ‘I never thought I would feel normal again. I never thought I would laugh again. And I found myself watching an episode of Frasier and laughing. … There is value in what you do because it took me out of this horror.’”
Leeves added, “Just David reading that letter and finding a reason to do it again and knowing that the words that David Angell had written had comforted people in his absence … it was very profound.”
Angell, Casey, and Lee were all writers on Cheers, the sitcom from which Frasier spun off, and the trio was approached to create a new show centering on Cheers breakout Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), according to The Guardian.
Frasier, which originally aired from 1993 to 2004, won a record five consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series. Modern Family — on which, coincidentally, Ferguson starred — later tied that record.
David and Lynn also founded the Angell Foundation, which “invests in transformative opportunities, cultivates compassionate leaders, and partners with organizations committed to creating a more equitable world.”
