Who is Fran Drescher? The woman taking on Hollywood!
The fire-and-brimstone characters that frequently lead unions in conflict with powerful corporations are rarely depicted as having a lot of Hollywood glitz.
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG), however, has always stood out in that regard. Ronald Reagan, a former US president best known at the time for appearing in corny western movies, formerly served as the union’s leader.
And Fran Drescher, the guild’s current leader, has garnered notice with a heated statement from her base in Los Angeles less than 24 hours into the guild’s battle against Hollywood’s streaming juggernauts.
She referred to companies like Netflix, Disney, and Paramount as “disgusting” and charged that they were “losing money left and right” while “giving their CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The speech, which soon gained notoriety, is representative of the larger labor rifts currently taking place around the globe. She charged that management ignored the “essential contributors that keep the machine running” in favor of “Wall Street and greed.”
Drescher’s complaints may be recognizable, but the 65-year-old’s ascent to union leadership is anything but conventional.
Fran Drescher was born in 1957 to a Jewish family in the Queens neighborhood of New York City.
She also met Peter Marc Jacobson as a student at the city’s Hillcrest High School, and they later got married in 1977 when she was just 21 years old.
She recounted in 2010 that the couple were “just kids and didn’t know who we truly were” when they got married. Together, we underwent a great deal. Nevertheless, he would quickly take over as her main creative partner.
Fran Drescher has paid her dues on the screen.
Her first break in Hollywood came from a small part in John Travolta’s blockbuster Saturday Night Fever.
She had a brief cameo appearance as a club dancer and asked the Hollywood star, “So, are you as good in bed as you are on the dance floor?”
Before gaining a co-starring position in the short-lived comedy Princesses, she quickly achieved popularity with a number of cinematic appearances, including the highly acclaimed This is Spinal Tap, where she played publicist Bobbi Flekman.
She rose to popularity, however, as the creator and star of the US sitcom The Nanny, in which she played Jewish fashionista Fran Fine, a nanny for a wealthy British family.
She received two Emmy nods and two Golden Globe nominations for the program, which she produced and co-wrote with Jacobsen. The program aired on the CBS network from 1993 to 1999.
He came out as gay after Drescher and Jacobsen’s divorce in 1999.
Although they kept working together creatively, they wrote the sitcom Happily Divorced, in which she played an actress coming to terms with the fact that her husband is gay.
Cancer survivor Drescher released a book called Cancer Schmancer in which she talked about her experience getting treated for the disease and the eight years of incorrect diagnoses that came before it. She subsequently established the same-named organization, which advocates for healthcare reform.
Fran Drescher has participated in politics throughout of her professional life. She decided against running to succeed Senator Hillary Clinton as senator for New York after endorsing her in the 2008 presidential election.
She also frequently captions pictures with statements like “Capitalism has become another word for Ruling Class Elite!” She has long expressed thoughts on the political left.
She identified herself a “anti-capitalist” in a 2017 interview with Vulture, adding that she was not “anti-making money,” but that it needed to be “calibrated within the spectrum of what’s a true value.”
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She eventually started a campaign to lead the SAG as a result of her political activism. She prevailed in a contentious contest to lead the guild in 2021 over actor Matthew Modine.
The rivalry between the two, who each represented a different part of the union, grew so sour that Modine accused Drescher of circulating false information about him.
