Growing up in Queens, Drescher was driven by the prospect of a life beyond her idyllic hometown bubble. She asked her father to give her driving lessons in lieu of paying for driver’s education, and used the money for a set of headshots instead.
At 15, she entered the Miss New York Teenager pageant, hoping to win and land a commercial agent. She placed first runner-up out of thousands, then cold-called agents said she placed first anyway, because, as Drescher figured, “they’re never gonna know.” She was signed almost immediately.
Aside from her instantly recognizable whine and thick Noo Yawk accent, Drescher’s persistence has always been her greatest asset. It aided her especially well when she was regularly taking two buses and a train to audition across Manhattan while enrolled in cosmetology school, scoring bit parts in everything from Saturday Night Fever to This Is Spinal Tap.
But it wasn’t until a chance encounter with the president of CBS on a transatlantic flight in 1991 that Drescher saw the chance to establish herself as more than just “that comedienne with the pretty face and the funny voice.” Jeff Sagansky knew Drescher from working with her on the short-lived sitcom Princesses, along with another pilot that never made it to air.
“I thought, Carpe diem. This is an opportunity, and he’s a captive audience,” says Drescher, a jewel in the setting of a Four Seasons conference room. She raises an eyebrow, waiting for a sitcom beat. “Where was he gonna go? Coach?”
After a bit of “light flirting,” Sagansky told Drescher that they would find her something. But that wasn’t good enough for her. “Jeff, I’m too much of an original,” she told him. “Nobody’s gonna write for me but me.” By the end of the nine-hour flight, Drescher had a meeting with CBS’s development office the following week. She and Peter Marc Jacobson, her then husband and creative partner, pitched what would go on to become The Nanny, which regularly topped the Nielsen ratings and lives on in syndication to this day.
Not too shabby for a flashy girl from Flushing.
Drescher is beaming at the memory. A midtown Manhattan hotel isn’t the most stimulating environment, but the 62-year-old actor, writer, and activist makes even the blandest setup come to life, whipping out zingers and anecdotes with gleeful abandon.
Wearing a navy pantsuit with a set of extravagant diamond earrings that would make even Elizabeth Taylor blush, Drescher, who now lives in Malibu, is back in New York promoting her first starring role in nearly a decade.
Indebted, NBC’s new sitcom from Dan Levy (not that one), airing on Thursdays, follows couple Dave (Adam Pally) and Rebecca (Abby Elliott), who are ready to start the next phase of their lives as young parents. But then Debbie (Drescher) and Stew (Steven Weber) show up on their adult son’s doorstep: They’re broke dead and need a place to live.
Drescher was in the process of selling another television project when her agent called about the script; apparently one of the characters was described as “a Fran Drescher type in every way.” Her agent had a suggestion for the casting director: Why not the original?
Drescher, who considers herself as much a writer and producer as she does a performer, prefers generating her own ideas over being a paid player. Levy was more than willing to work with her on developing the project. “They kind of had to service my largeness in every way,” Drescher says; “my persona, my fame, my clothes, my TV queue, and what I think the audience expects from my characters.” Drescher doesn’t play mean-spirited, and Debbie—an overbearing but always good-intentioned mother—is the perfect vehicle for her optimistic and uncomplicated brand of humor. “Plus, if I’m gonna play a mom and a grandma,” says Drescher, “I want her to represent a woman of my generation who’s still got it.”
She’s been in the business of being Fran Drescher since The Nanny, which aired for six seasons from 1993 to 1999. Taking inspiration from her own upbringing, the series starred Drescher as the sharp-witted and sharper-dressed Fran Fine, a cosmetics salesgirl who became the nanny to wealthy Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield’s family on the Upper East Side.
While The Nanny was created by and entirely around her, Drescher still had to fight regularly developed to retain creative control when male executives tried to tinker with her vision.
Before the series even went to air, she said, Procter & Gamble wanted to buy the show outright, on the condition that Fran be Italian instead of Jewish. Luckily, Drescher is pretty impossible to ignore. “I knew we couldn’t write the show as rich in specificity [with that change], so I said, Fran Fine must be Jewish,” she recalls. The network compiled.
Set in the glitzy world of New York City theater, The Nanny regularly featured an array of celebrity guest stars playing heightened versions of themselves: Bette Midler, Celine Dion, Eartha Kitt, Joan Collins, Whoopi Goldberg, Coolio, Patti LaBelle, and Elton John all appeared on the series. Some of these guest stars served a dual purpose, ensuring the series didn’t depict an overly white version of NYC.
“There was a point where I felt like the show was too white and I wanted to infuse people of color, because it wasn’t happening in the ’90s,” says Drescher. She had the idea to cast Ray Charles as the boyfriend of Fran’s Grandma Yetta, in a four-episode arc that marked his first acting gig on a sitcom. “When you think about Friends, Mad About You, and Everybody Loves Raymond, they were all very white. Those were shows of their time, but we were set in New York in the theater world, and I wanted to bring other elements to it.”
