STILL FRAN-TASTIC!
Nanny Fine’s about be a Broadway star
If there’s one motto Fran Drescher lives by, it’s “seize the day” – and almost 30 years after the actress wisecracked her way into hearts all over the world, she’s seizing the day once again.
The actress might have kissed goodbye to her alter ego Fran Fine in The Nanny more than two decades ago, but now she’s bringing her back – in a Broadway musical.
“We’ll take as much time as the universe offers us to make it as perfect as possible,” says the 63-year-old of the project. “It’ll be very funny.”
When The Nanny took the world by storm in 1993, it seemed like Fran Drescher had materialised out of nowhere.
Of course, that wasn’t the case. She’d been working around the traps for years, landing parts in everything from Saturday Night Fever in 1977 to This is Spinal Tap in 1984.
But it was The Nanny that put her in the spotlight.
Fran and her husband Peter Marc Jacobson, who met at high school and married at the age of 21, set their sights on showbiz careers from an early age. However, it wasn’t until the early ’90s, when the pair were well down the track of creating their own sitcom, that their wildest dreams came true.
Courtesy of some serious serendipity, Fran found herself on a flight to London with the president of a top US TV network and she knew it was her chance.
“I ran into the bathroom to put some make-up on,” she laughs, “because I knew this was an opportunity of a lifetime. I started talking to him when I came out, basically telling him, ‘Have I got a show for you.’ He finally said, nine and a half hours later, ‘When you get back to LA, call my office.’”
When The Nanny debuted, starring Fran as the street-smart title character with a heart of gold, it was an instant global hit. Behind the scenes, however, Fran has had her fair share of heartbreak.
At the age of 28, before she became famous, she and a friend were raped at gunpoint while Peter was
forced to watch. In 1999, the same year that The Nanny ended its six-year run, she and Peter divorced and soon after, Peter, who’d previously told Fran he was bisexual, came out as gay. The following year she was diagnosed with uterine cancer.
“Nobody leaves this planet unscathed,” says Fran.
“But what we do with it, how we work through it and what becomes of us as a result is what makes all the difference… Always count your blessings.”
Now 21 years cancer-free, and “best friends” with her ex, Fran is still famous, still stylish (as the theme song to The Nanny proclaimed) and still here. Streamed re-runs of the show have garnered a whole new generation of fans and she and Peter are enjoying working on the Broadway musical adaptation, for which she teases that she has her eyes on an as-yet unnamed pop star who has crossed over into movies for the lead role.
But for die-hard fans, it’s difficult to imagine anyone filling Fran’s shoes. Her particular blend of confidence and chutzpah reveals itself in the stories she rattles off from her heyday – like the night she, Jennifer Lopez, Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Cameron Diaz and Edward Norton took a stretch limo from a Miami nightclub to Lenny Kravitz’s house.
“Lenny said, ‘Gee, we should all go back to my house, but how are we gonna get outta here?’ And I said, ‘I got a car! We can all fit in it.’ That whole crowd piled into my car with my girlfriends.”
Then, there was the evening she had the Princess of Wales in stitches at a fashion awards night. “Princess Diana hosted a cocktail party. It was wallto-wall people, and she stood in the centre of it, with a roped-off area.”
Determined to meet the glam royal, Fran elbowed her way to the front and opened conversation with a reference to the fact they were both on a famous best-andworst-dressed list.
“I said to her, ‘Princess, we’re both on Mr Blackwell’s list.’ And she said, ‘Yes, but I’m on the best-dressed and you’re on the worst-dressed.’ And
I said, ‘But you got Princess Margaret on your list and I got Demi Moore and
Madonna on mine. You’re on the wrong list, Princess.’ And Diana bellied over laughing.”
One of the things Fran is proudest of is that her divorce from Peter, who wrote, directed and produced The Nanny, never became spiteful. “It was our baby. I am very proud of that.”
There is, says Fran, no one new in her life apart from her dog Angel Grace – a white husky shepherd mix.
“I rescued her right before the lockdown and we really bonded together at home.
I got very lucky.”
Other than that, she says, “I’m in a relationship with myself and it’s going quite well. Really, for the first time, I feel very peaceful being alone with myself. I practice Buddhist philosophy and I call myself a Bu-Jew.”
‘I’m in a relationship with myself and it’s going quite well’