Fran Drescher: From "Nanny" to President of Hollywood's Most Powerful Union

by Jessica Gomez

When you turned on the television in the mid-1990s and heard a nasal, high-pitched, and infectious laugh , it was impossible not to recognize Fran Drescher, who had practically made her trademark voice.

She achieved worldwide fame playing Fran Fine in The Nanny , a sitcom she had created with Peter Marc Jacobson, to whom she was married at the time.

The series, broadcast over six years until 1999, brought us the adventures of a woman from Queens who ends up working as a nanny for a wealthy family in Manhattan and with whose father (a widower) she maintains sentimental tension episode after episode.

Entertainment Weekly recognized Drescher for having won over audiences with her charisma, her eccentric image, her talent for comedy, and also for having broken the mold by proudly portraying a working-class Jewish woman , something unusual on television at the time.

After The Nanny , Drescher disappeared. She starred in other series such as Living with Fran and Happily Divorced, the latter inspired by her own divorce from Jacobson, who, after the separation, came out and declared himself openly gay , as reported by media such as People magazine and CBS .

However, in terms of acting, Drescher never again achieved the success she had achieved with The Nanny .

She has published several books, including Enter Whining (1996, an autobiography) and Cancer Schmancer (2002), which recounts her experience of suffering from misdiagnosed uterine cancer. This experience, in fact, led her to found the Cancer Schmancer Movement, an NGO focused on early detection and cancer prevention.

Since then, and in recent years, Drescher's voice has increasingly become a totem on various fronts. She presents herself on social media not only as an actress, creator, writer, and director, but also as an environmentalist, LGBTQ activist, and Buddhist.

She is also president of the SAG-AFTRA union, which represents more than 160,000 media and entertainment professionals , including actors, voice actors, and hosts. Her role became even more prominent during the 2023 strike, when her impassioned speech against studio abuses went viral , turning her into an unexpected symbol of union struggle.

At sixty-seven years old, Drescher recently celebrated her "25 years of good health" with a video in which she greeted all her followers from Italy and said she was "very grateful" and continued "the practice of self-improvement."