Taking Back My Life
AFTER YEARS OF BURYING HER PAIN, THE ‘NANNY’ STAR TELLS WHO SHE’S FOUND INNER PEACE
Fran Drescher isn’t easily ruffled. Take, for instance, her approach to notoriously horrific LA traffic. Curled up in the plush master bedroom of her beach-side Malibu home to talk to WHO, the actress and comedian remains philosophical. “You could get road rage and think, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to get to where I’m going!’ Or you can think as Buddhists do: Look around, take that in, and maybe see something that will surprise you,” she says. “It helps you to accept life as it presents itself and be grateful for it.”
Yet finding calm amid chaos certainly didn’t come easily for Drescher, whose unmistakable laugh and thick New York accent have brought joy to fans for decades. Reflecting on her darkest moments – including a terrifying rape in 1985; a very public divorce from her husband of 21 years, Peter Marc Jacobson, in 1999 (after which he publicly revealed he is gay); and a uterine cancer diagnosis in 2000 – Drescher, 62, says comedy was her way of masking her pain and insecurities. But now Drescher, who is starring on new comedy series Indebted and developing a stage musical adaptation of her hit ’90s sitcom The Nanny for Broadway, says she’s taking her life back one day at a time.
“In order for me to be well-rounded, I have to sometimes make it about me,” she says.
Having grown up in Queens with a father, Morty, who was a naval technician, and a mother, Sylvia, who worked behind the cosmetics counter at a local pharmacy, she says her “joyful” home shifted the moment her older sister Nadine fell ill (she declined to elaborate on the nature of the illness). “That pivoted the family’s focus and balance onto [my sister],” says Drescher, who didn’t want to be “an additional burden” to her parents.
“At a very early age I got the message to feel bad if something was about me. And that’s probably why I’m an actress, because at the end of the day, nobody becomes an actor if they don’t on some level want to say, ‘Look at me, Ma’.” Determined to find purpose and a sense of self, Drescher chose to follow in the footsteps of TV icons such as I Love Lucy’s Lucille Ball and I Dream of Jeannie’s Barbara Eden and started landing minor film roles, including her first major break, in Saturday Night Fever alongside John Travolta. “I decided I should try and make my living out of something that comes easily to me and doesn’t feel like work,” says Drescher, who was once told by a teacher she’d have to change her highpitched, nasal voice if she ever wanted to be successful. But in 1993,
“I have to sometimes make it about me”
‘That changed me … I wanted to do it all, and I did’
Drescher (along with Jacobson) created The Nanny, which she wrote, produced, directed and starred in as Fran Fine; the show wound up running for six years. “That definitely changed me significantly,” she says. “I wanted to do it all, and I did. It was a very fertile time creatively.”
Despite the success, Drescher was dealing with a secret, unimaginable pain. In 1985, at age 28, the actress and a friend were raped at gunpoint, while Jacobson, then already Drescher’s husband of seven years, was forced to watch. “After the rape, my friends knew, but I couldn’t even call my parents and tell them. I had my sister tell them,” she recalls. “I never wanted to be any additional stress for my parents, having seen how traumatised they were from when my sister was young and having health issues. So I’d go into my room and be by myself and quiet for hours. I didn’t want to ever have to tell them something was wrong with me.”
From there Drescher and Jacobson’s marriage spiralled downward over the course of the next 14 years. “I wasn’t feeling as happy as I thought I’d feel with money and fame and creative control,” she says. “Peter started to have control issues that I found somewhat suffocating, and only in hindsight do we now understand that he was working so hard to control his authentic self, his true orientation.” Two years after the marriage ended, Jacobson told Drescher he was gay, but their love for one another never faded. “I now lovingly refer to Peter as my gay ex-husband,” she says.
She compares leaving the relationship to “walking through fire”. “I had never done anything for myself that was against the will of somebody else that I cared about,” she says. “And that was part of my problem. I kind of had a back seat in my own life. I was making everybody else happy but not really myself.”
One year after her divorce, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, and had an immediate radical hysterectomy. Her habit of not asking for help “became like a real mental block, and I had to break through it. Getting cancer was my opportunity, because I couldn’t do it alone. It opened me up to realising that supporting and advising other people gives you a false sense that you have your s--t together.”
Drescher says she was able to “gain a lot of clarity” in therapy: “I was in such crisis and feeling feelings that I never really allowed myself and saying out loud things that I felt guilty about just thinking, for my growth as a human being. Now I’m not really obsessed with being the best, most need-less, caregiver.
Now relying on her faith in Buddhism and the lessons she’s learned has helped conquer more than gridlock: Drescher says she has a new-found love for the woman she’s become. “Getting really connected to myself has been a great journey,” she says.
“Now I don’t feel like I have to be in a relationship, as I’m in a relationship with myself, and it’s going quite well!”