Introducing The Nanny
Fran Drescher is a film and television actress best known for her role as the street-wise, nasal-voiced, fun-loving nanny, Fran Fine, on the '90s hit television sitcom The Nanny. In an interview that appears on The Nanny: The Complete First Season DVD Fran states, "Where ever I go, everywhere in the world people say 'Can you do the laugh?'...So sometimes I think that when I die I just wanna put on my gravestone that I was known for my laugh." Although having a nasal voice and laugh was a very distinguishing feature, other things Miss Fine was well known for include: big hair, fashion, shopping, eating, always denying her age, searching for Mr Right, speaking Yiddish, Flushing Queens and being a Barbra Streisand fan. Fran Drescher came up with the idea for The Nanny while visiting her friend Twiggy in the UK and realising that her crude New Yorker ways were funny in a high-class, British context.
Set in Manhattan, New York, the Sheffield family mansion was turned upside down when Miss Fine entered the mix. The plot can be most likened to that of The Sound of Music. The show has been said to have the feeling of Upstairs, Downstairs, which was a 1970s British television drama set in a townhouse, portraying the lives of the servants "downstairs" and their masters "upstairs." It can also be said that The Nanny has a very definite connection to the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Fran Drescher's facial expressions and physical comedy as Miss Fine are reminiscent of Lucy Ball's in her performance of Lucy Ricardo, and in addition to Miss Fine's wacky shenanigans in general, some specific episodes (e.g. 3.20 "Where's The Pearls?" and 5.14 "Not Without My Nanny") obviously took direct inspiration from I Love Lucy. The Nanny also involved having famous guest stars doing cameos, as did I Love Lucy.
Fame with The Nanny
Success with The Nanny came after much persistence on the parts of both Fran Drescher and her then-husband Peter Marc Jacobsen. As Fran put it in her book Enter Whining, "After 15 years of near hits but mostly misses" suddenly she and Peter “two kids from Flushing” were "actually in the game" (p.130). The Nanny turned out to be the vehicle for the couple's lifelong desire for success. In 1991, shortly prior to hitting the big-time with The Nanny, Fran and Peter faced a failure that led Fran to give herself a timeframe of five years to find success in show business before she would quit. They created an unsuccessful sitcom titled Princesses that lasted only five episodes before it was cancelled. Fran said in a 1997 interview “I did a pilot every single year and Princesses was the only one that finally sold into series-- as limited as it was.” It was to be Fran and Peter’s final failed sitcom before finding world-wide success with The Nanny.
The Nanny pilot aired on U.S. television in November 1993. The pilot episode was well received by the studio audience. and when the first season of The Nanny was re-run during the U.S. summer of 1994, the show took off nation-wide. During its first few seasons, The Nanny became a successful Emmy Award-winning sitcom and Fran Drescher became an internationally famous TV star. At the height of its popularity, The Nanny was one of the Top 10 shows on TV. Fran Drescher became an A-List celebrity, appearing on talk shows, touring other countries to promote the show and being featured in television commercials for names such as Pizza Hut, Haines and Three Musketeers Bars. In 1997, she released an autobiographical book titled Enter Whining chronicling her life, including her fame with The Nanny. She also created and starred in a movie based on The Nanny called Beautician and the Beast.
Whereas some sitcom stars' off-screen personas closely match the bubbly character they played on-screen (e.g. Ellen DeGeneres/ Ellen Morgan and Lauren Graham/ Loralai Gilmore) Fran Drescher's public persona has always been plainer and more serious than her ditzy, larger-than-life counterpart Miss Fine. In a 1997 Hollywood Reporter interview Fran stated, "All of her is in me, not all of me is in her ... The character is such a joy that it's almost a relief sometimes to be in her sweet, funny world.” Fran Drescher's charismatic performance of Fran Fine often produced hilarious results. During The Making of The Nanny on The Nanny: The Complete First Season DVD Fran cites episode 1.7 "Imaginary Friend" as the starting point for physical comedy on the show. "I enjoyed doing it. I grew up and I used to watch Lucy all the time. She did a lot of physical comedy and it's just plain old funny."
Life after The Nanny
When The Nanny was cancelled in 1999 it was past its hey-day. It was time to move on. To this day, Fran Drescher is best known for her role as Fran Fine on The Nanny. In 2000, Fran Drescher was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She was operated on and now calls herself a cancer survivor. In an Australian interview in 2002 Fran Drescher said of her ordeal, "I felt very vulnerable. I wasn't superwoman any more." Fran has become an advocate for women's health, initiating the Cancer Schmancer Movement. In 2004, the cast of The Nanny reunited at Fran Drescher’s beachside home in California for a televised special called The Nanny Reunion. In 2005, Fran created and starred in a short-lived sitcom based on her relationship with a boyfriend 16 years her junior called Living With Fran, which lasted for a year. Her latest project, The Fran Drescher Tawk Show, began in 2010 on Fox Television and is co-produced with ex-husband Peter Jacobsen.
Fran Drescher came from humble beginnings; she was born 30th September 1957 in Flushing Queens, New York to Morty and Sylvia Drescher. In Enter Whining, Fran says her parents were loving and supportive and would say, “We don't have a lot of money, but we're very rich anyway" (p.6). Fran’s career goal was always entrepreneurism. As a young adult, she studied hairdressing at the Ultissima Beauty Institute. In reaction to the 1988 writers strike in Hollywood, she started her own line of gourmet croutons Loaf n' Kisses. A 1997 interview states: When Princesses failed, Fran gave herself “five years to get on the inside [of show business] in a really solid way” otherwise she was “prepared to ditch it.” “If I'm going to be in a business, I want some control over it, or I'd rather open a boutique in Massachusetts. That's the reason I maintained my interest in hairdressing and started the crouton business. I like to be my own boss.”
Sources
Abbott, D. “Fran Drescher Q &A”, Hollywood Reporter, Wednesday, May 21st, 1997
Available Online: http://home.frognet.net/~ritchie/hrdrescherqanda.htm
Beun-Chown, J. “Fran Drescher: Now I've Frozen My Ovaries“, Good Medicine, June 2002
Available Online: http://paulozelinsky.com/~ritchie/articles/good-medicine-interview.htm
Drescher, F. Enter Whining, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, January 23, 1997
Fran Drescher on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Air Date: Wednesday, July 17, 1996
The Making of The Nanny Special Feature on The Nanny - The Complete First Season DVD, Sony Pictures, Released March 17, 2009
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