He has three daughters with Laura Louie: Deni, Zoe, and Makani. They live primarily in Maui, Hawaii — a geography that is about as far from the federal penitentiary system’s geography as one can get while remaining in the United States. He has spoken about his personal and professional life with a disarming directness that tends to preempt the kind of managed public image that most celebrities of his visibility maintain. He tells stories on himself. He admits to things. He acknowledges complications. This quality — a lack of self-protective smoothness — is itself a form of the charisma that he says he recognized in his father, deployed in the service of a life that has been organized around entirely different values.
He has become, in the forty-plus years since Cheers, one of those actors whose presence in a film or television project functions as a reliable signal of a certain kind of quality: ambitious, psychologically rich, committed to the full range of what the medium can do. His Oscar nominations span more than twenty years — The People vs. Larry Flynt in 1996, The Messenger in 2009, Three Billboards in 2017 — which is the kind of sustained recognition that the Academy reserves for actors who have been consistently excellent across decades rather than for a single performance.
The craft that produced that recognition was built in the specific conditions of his biography: the childhood in Lebanon, Ohio, without the father who had left; the college years at Hanover, where theater provided a structure and a community; the New York years of understudy work and small roles; the Cheers years of sustained professional television; the film years of deliberate range-building. It is a career that makes sense on its own terms, as a story about professional development and artistic ambition, without any reference to the father’s conviction.