EXCLUSIVE: Fran Drescher has long recognized her value to herself and what she could potentially offer the world ever since she was a teenager growing up in Flushing, Queens, N.Y.
The 62-year-old actress and comedian rose to fame in large part due to her role as the venerable and rambunctious Fran Fine on the iconic television series “The Nanny,” but since an early age, Drescher knew she’d be headed for success in whatever path she chose simply because she was unique in her own way – much of which has to do with her distinguishable voice but also the guidance her parents instilled in her as a kid.
“My mom said to me when I was in like middle school, ‘You don’t need to take typing because you’re going to have a secretary,’” Drescher quipped to Fox News of her mother, Sylvia Drescher. “And she was right!”Drescher is once again set to be immortalized in television history, this time on “Fran Drescher: In My Own Words,” an in-depth special slated to premiere on Reelz that paints a vivid portrait of Drescher’s life amid the triumphs and low points of the American sitcom icon who saw for herself exactly what her Hollywood idol, the late great Lucille Ball, saw for women in television and comedy.
“It always blows my mind when I think about when things happen like this, or there’ll be some comedian that’ll tell a Fran Drescher joke and they know they’re going to get a laugh because most of the audience knows who I am,” said Drescher. “So it is kind of, if not a little mind-blowing because I’ve been me since I was a chubby kid in Queens. And here I am, internationally famous and successful. It’s been a long journey and I’ve traveled a far distance.”Drescher’s parents, Sylvia, 86, and Morty Drescher, 90, remain married to this day and both appear in the Reelz special. Drescher said she marveled at the opportunity to have her parents included because “I’m not going to have them forever and they’ve been involved in my career all the way through.”
In watching the special, one can certainly identify from her parents’ banter where Drescher developed her witty chops and precision comedic timing.“I grew up watching ‘I Love Lucy’ reruns and it was on probably a couple of times a day – but definitely once a day from a very young age,” recalled Drescher. “And for some reason, I just was very enthralled with Lucille Ball. With her look, with her sense of style, with her physical comedy, with her voice – the way she modulated it – just everything. And I started to want to be like her, want to become an actress like her, want to be on TV like her.”For its work, “The Nanny” enjoyed a six-season run from 1993 to 1999 and 146 episodes that Drescher said was heavily inspired by Ball’s blueprint of being the centerpiece of a show while still allowing others around her to come into their own as supporting characters.
“Even when we were in the writers’ room starting the show, we would always talk about ‘I Love Lucy,’” said Drescher. “We would always talk about the relationship between Lucy and Ricky and him being in show business like Mr. Sheffield and the physical comedy and using that long staircase and dressing well and looking beautiful, but being funny and making fun of the central clown was something that they really mastered on that show.”“It’s really not easy to make the main character, the clown,” she continued. “Usually, they are more of the straight person and the voice of reason and everybody that dances around them are the clowns. But she figured out how to do it where she remained the centerpiece and the clown and yet everybody else had their opportunity to be funny too.”
But despite the unparalleled success, the two-time Primetime Emmy-winner would garner in her 30-year-plus career, Drescher wasn’t always the pick of the litter.In fact, the “Beautician and the Beast” said she reached a point early in her career where even as an unknown performer she felt disrespected by Hollywood due to the roles she was being handed and felt she was much “smarter” than many of the executives making decisions at the top.
“I think that I’ve always been entrepreneurial to a certain degree,” she explained. “I mean, even when I was in high school and sometime after when I started going up on commercials and things as an actress during my freshman year of college and because I began working – I decided to drop out of college and then go to Beauty Culture school in case the acting didn’t work out, I could always get into the hairdressing business, but not working in a local, you know, beauty parlor in the neighborhood, but aspiring to become the Beverly [Adams] Sassoon of my time.”“And when I was working as an actress, I wasn’t really happy with the work I was getting for the most part,” Drescher maintained, adding that early on she would be relegated to playing “the hooker with the heart of gold.”
