Fran Drescher, who is most known for her role on the television series The Nanny, has opened up about what she’s been up to since the show. Fran was a true delight on the show, and viewers tuned in each week just to see what she would get up to. Fran made the character her own by deploying her famous voice for the role.
In fact, Fran even tried to change her voice when she was first starting out, but no dice: When she would speak differently, she’d also lose her sense of who she was. Trying to change her voice also cost her a role in an “epic television drama” that Jane Seymour eventually won. Fran said, “They said to my manager, ‘You know, she did fine, but she talked too slow, and it’s only an 18-hour miniseries. So that was kind of the end of that.”
Fran also talked about motherhood in the interview. While she was known for portraying a nanny to three kids on TV, Fran never had children of her own and says that she sometimes wishes she had.
“I think I would have been a good mom, and sometimes I think I kind of missed out on that.”
Fran was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2000 and had a full hysterectomy as part of her treatment. In 2019, she wrote, “It was strange — and kind of poetic — that my reproductive organs, of all things, had cancer. But it was also an amazing affirmation that pain finds its way to exactly the right place in the body if you don’t deal with it.”
Fran was alluding to a tragic experience she had 15 years before her diagnosis. She was raped at gunpoint in her home in 1985, and she believes that not dealing with the trauma from the experience contributed to her cancer. In 2019, she wrote, “Afterward, I didn’t really get into my feelings or my vulnerabilities. I never wanted to come off as ‘weak,’ so I just kind of buried it and got on with life.”
Fran continued to explain her belief: “Since I hadn’t been paying attention to my own vulnerabilities, my pain from the rape lodged itself in my uterus.”
However, she also said that having cancer forced her to ask for help from others, which isn’t always something she wanted to do: “The cancer was my opportunity to ask for help and basically become a more well-rounded person.”
As a result of her surgery, she wasn’t able to have kids of her own. She explained, “Suddenly I was a person who couldn’t have children. But I gave birth to a book, Cancer Schmancer, and launched a movement with the goal of transforming people from patients into medical consumers.”
