There’s a lot going on in Fran Drescher‘s life, from shooting the pilot of a new NBC sitcom costarring Wings’ Steven Webber to standing at the forefront of the Cancer Schmancer movement and taking on a variety of projects, including the possibility of a new version of her most famous series, The Nanny.
Focusing on the latter for a moment, when you think back to that 1993-99 sitcom, you’re not looking at a show that was trying to change the world or deliver a deep message to the masses.
It, like I Love Lucy or Laverne & Shirley, was simply about having fun by putting the actress right in the middle of things for six wonderful seasons playing Fran Fine, a cosmetics saleswoman from Queens who somehow finds herself hired as the nanny to the three children of Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy). The result is comedy chaos and, ever-so-gradually, a growing romance between employer and employee.
Nearly 20 have passed since the show ended, but it has managed to remain a part of the audience’s collective memory while continuously gaining new fans around the world. As such, it’s still very much a part of Fran’s heart — which isn’t entirely surprising when you consider that she created the show with ex-husband Peter Marc Jacobson and they both served as executive producers. Naturally, the question to ask is why it endures the way that it does.
And it’s a real interesting question,” Fran told Closer Weekly in an exclusive interview. “I think it’s a very likable character and a very lovable character, but also great eye candy. It’s that Upstairs/Downstairs, blue collar meets blue blood relationship sprinkled with sexual tension. It’s an immature grownup acting more like a kid sometimes more than the kids. And it’s all wrapped up in a very traditional silhouette, very much like The Sound of Music — only instead of Julie Andrews, I come to the door.”
Shaking Things Up
It’s no doubt the same way that the character must certainly come to the door whenever the actress is up for a new role, which is something Fran accepts. “Look,” she says, “is the industry going to want to see me stretch in directions as an actress that are outside of what I’m so well known for?
It’s probably unlikely, because my strength is that people love me for that character, so that makes me more interesting financially to people that are making a project, because I’m known around the world. So it becomes a bit of a catch-22. But having said that, I’m also a writer and a producer and a best-selling author, and now I’m writing a Broadway musical. I’m also dabbling in doing standup comedy. I’m going to start doing a fourth one soon. I have a very interesting and wonderful career that keeps me, in its diversity, interested all the time and never bored.
“The truth is,” she continued, “The Nanny continues to be a great door opener for me. Frankly, it’s never been off the air in 25 years anywhere in the world. I continue to be adored for that character. Wherever I go in the world, people know me for that character and I leverage that all for the greater good. So it’s a really helpful tool; I continue to work as an actress, mainly so that I can have relevance and talk to people like myself about all the things that mean so much to me.”
The Birth of Cancer Schmancer
Primary among those things is the Cancer Schmancer Movement, which was born out of the fact that for two years she demonstrated symptoms that were misdiagnosed by a total of eight doctors, resulting in her admission to Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles on June 21, 2000. There she was diagnosed with uterine cancer and had to undergo an immediate hysterectomy. Afterwards, she was given a clean bill of health, but the damage was already done.
As a result, on June 21, 2007, which was the seventh anniversary of her operation, she announced the national launch of the Cancer Schmancer, a non-profit dedicated to ensuring that all women’s cancers be diagnosed while in stage 1, the most curable stage. Since then she has become a health activist driven by a mission to have women’s mortality rates drop as their health care improves. Her latest effort takes place on April 22nd, Earth Day.
“Cancer Schmancer started a very progressive program called Be the Change,” she explains, “that targets teens, tweens and college aged students. We’re very proud of this educational video that we produced. It has myself, Jamie Foxx, Jeff Bridges, a bunch of kids and a lot of animation, and it empowers kids by educating, motivating and activating them into becoming mindful consumers. Kids today, for the first time in U.S. history, are predicted to not live as long as their parents.
We at Cancer Schmancer don’t wish to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. We want to get kids to start becoming more discerning consumers. They don’t vote and they don’t pay taxes, so they don’t wield a whole lot of influence on Washington, but they are a multi-billion dollar spending demographic, and how they spend their dollars becomes not only their vote, but also their protest. We want them to start looking at everything through that prism.”
