Fran Drescher, best known for her starring role on the sitcom “The Nanny,” was re-elected president of SAG-AFTRA amid Hollywood’s first double union strike in 63 years.
On Friday, election results showed she received 81 of the votes cast. Her challenger Maya Gilbert-Dunbar, however, received 19 percent.
SAG-AFTRA Treasurer Joely Fisher also defeated challenger Peter Antico, scoring 70 percent.
After Drescher’s victory, she said she was “honored to serve my union for another term as president.”
“These are dynamic times, and as a membership body we will weather the storms, stand by our principles and ensure that our important contributions to this collaborative art form are never diminished again, but rather elevated,” the actress said in a statement.
Big win! Fran Drescher, best known for her starring role in the sitcom “The Nanny,” was re-elected as president of SAG-AFTRA in Hollywood’s first dual union strike in 63 years. seen in 2022
The 65-year-old Queens native has been President of SAG-AFTRA since 2021.
She is leading the industry’s first mass strike since the 1980s, in which artists are also demanding protection from the threat to their jobs posed by artificial intelligence.
Drescher’s own career spans decades in movies, television and Broadway. However, she is best known for her starring role in the ’90s sitcom The Nanny, which she co-starred with her then-husband Peter Marc Jacobson, who is now openly gay.
She reportedly earned $1.5 million per episode in the series’ final season, making her one of the highest-paid television actresses of her time, while her net worth is estimated at $25 million to $30 million.
Off-screen, the actress is known for her strong anti-capitalist views and overcoming horrific past life experiences – from being raped at gunpoint to battling uterine cancer.
Drescher’s acting career also got off to a rocky start during her college years, when she was on the verge of taking a completely different path.
As a freshman, Drescher dropped out of Queens College at the City University of New York because all acting classes were full and instead majored in cosmetology, according to a 1996 interview with Redbook.
But she managed to secure her first role as a dancer in the 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever,” in which she asked John Travolta’s character, “Are you as good in bed as you are on the dance floor?”
Elected by her colleagues: On Friday, election results showed she received 81 of the votes cast. Her challenger Maya Gilbert-Dunbar, on the other hand, received 19 percent (Olivia Wilde was seen at the strike outside Universal Studios earlier this month).
The following year, she was cast in several more films, including American Hot Wax and Summer of Fear.
In the 1980s, Drescher played roles in films such as Gorp, The Hollywood Knights, Doctor Detroit, The Big Picture, UHF and Cadillac Man.
Her most memorable role of the decade was as publicist Bobbi Flekman in the 1984 mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” – a character who also made a cameo appearance in the fifth season of Drescher’s “The Nanny.”
Drescher created the sitcom in 1993 with Jacobson, her high school sweetheart, to whom she was married for 21 years. It aired on CBS until 1999.
Drescher once again took on the role of Fran Fine, who becomes a nanny to four children before she charms their widowed father, and thus achieves new fame.
She reportedly earned $1.5 million per episode in the series’ final season, making her one of the highest-paid television actresses of her time.
She appeared in several other films in the 1990s, including Francis Ford Coppola’s 1996 film Jack and The Beautician and the Beast the following year, which she also produced.
In 2000, she starred alongside Woody Allen in “Picking Up the Piece” before portraying the role of Pearl in the 2006 animated film “Shark Bait.”
Drescher returned to television in 2010 with her own daytime chat show, The Fran Drescher Tawk Show, but it was canceled after a trial period.
Role of a lifetime: Drescher’s own career spans decades in movies, television and Broadway, but she is best known for her starring role in the ’90s sitcom “The Nanny.” Pictured: Drescher as her character Fran Fine on The Nanny, for which she reportedly earned $1.5 million per episode last season
Drescher created and produced The Nanny from 1993 to 1999 with Peter Marc Jacobson, her high school boyfriend, to whom she was married for 21 years until he came out as gay. The couple (pictured in their youth) say they still love each other and will not get married again
The following year she filmed the sitcom Happily Divorced with Jacobson, who had since come out as gay and the couple had separated.
As part of promoting the show, Drescher performed the weddings of three gay couples in New York City using a minister’s license she received from the Universal Life Church.
She selected the couples through a competition she launched on Facebook, “Fran Drescher’s “Love is Love” Gay Marriage Contest,” which was based on the stories they submitted about the origins of their relationship and its evolution.
Drescher moved to Broadway in 2014 and played stepmother Madame in the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella for ten weeks.
She most recently played a recurring role in Adam Sandler’s Hotel Transylvania film series, where she voices Eunice.
Beyond the stage, Drescher — who has Jewish parents and grandparents who immigrated to the U.S. from Romania and Poland — has endured several traumatic experiences, from being raped at gunpoint to battling uterine cancer.
Her personal life also made headlines when she and Jacobson divorced in 1999 after 21 years of marriage and her ex came out as gay.
Semi-autobiographical: Drescher got her big break as a producer and actress as nasal bride seller and later caregiver Fran Fine for six seasons on CBS from 1993 to 1999
Decades in the spotlight: Her personal life also made headlines when she and Jacobson divorced in 1999 after 21 years of marriage and her ex came out as gay; seen in 2022
Drescher said she didn’t know that Jacobson, who she met when they were both just 15, was gay, in large part because they had a very active sex life – which she spoke about in 2015.
In an exclusive interview with last year, Drescher revealed that she would never marry again and that she plans to grow old with Jacobson because “we still love each other.” She is also a vocal supporter of LGBT rights.
The couple endured a horrific ordeal in their late 20s when two robbers broke into their Los Angeles home, stole their possessions and raped Drescher and a friend at gunpoint.
Jacobson was also attacked, tied up and forced to witness the entire ordeal.
It took Drescher several years to recover from the trauma of the incident and even longer before she told her story to the press.
In 2020, she revealed how her photographic memory had helped police identify her rapist – who was on parole at the time – and send him to prison for life.
Drescher remarried informally in 2014, to Indian-American engineer Shiva Ayyadurai at her beach house.
Both claimed to be married and the event was widely reported as such, but Ayyadurai later said it was “not a formal wedding” but a celebration of their “friendship in a spiritual ceremony with close friends and family”.
The couple separated two years later.
Drescher also battled uterine cancer in the early 2000s, which she wrote about in her book “Cancer Schmancer,” which was intended to raise awareness of the early signs of the disease.
Survivor: Drescher battled uterine cancer in the early 2000s, which she wrote about in her book “Cancer Schmancer,” which was intended to raise awareness of the early signs of the disease; seen in June 2022
In June 2000, she was admitted to Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles to immediately undergo a radical hysterectomy, which cleared her of the disease.
On the seventh anniversary of her surgery, Drescher announced the creation of the Cancer Schmancer Movement, a charity dedicated to ensuring that women’s cancers are diagnosed in the early stages.
An outspoken public health advocate, Drescher helped get Johanna’s cancer education law passed unanimously through Congress, and she was appointed women’s health diplomat by the Bush administration.
In this role, she traveled the world and worked with organizations in Romania, Hungary, Serbia and Poland.
Her political successes extend beyond health care, and in 2008 she supported Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, including attending a Super Democratic rally on her behalf.
She also supported Barack Obama for re-election in 2012 and Joe Biden in 2020.
Drescher describes herself as an explicit anti-capitalist and has long expressed concerns about capitalist greed.
Amid the COVID-10 pandemic in 2020, she supported calls for a general strike against the rich, forcing employees to return to work.
The two-time Golden Globe nominee proudly describes herself as an “anti-capitalist” who is a registered Democrat but identifies with the Green Party.
“I really think we need a new system hybrid.” I’m not anti-money-making, don’t get me wrong. “I don’t think making money is a bad thing per se,” Fran told Vulture in 2017.