Once ‘The Nanny,’ now center stage as the actors union leader

The stage was different, and so was the tone. But the voice was unmistakable.

Fran Drescher, the owner of a distinctly nasal, Queens-inflected accent, made her name in Hollywood for her starring role in the sitcom The Nanny. Last week, she appeared before dozens of cameras as the president of the actors union that voted unanimously earlier in the day to go on strike, delivering a fiery argument depicting the stakes of the decision.

“The eyes of the world and particularly the eyes of labour are upon us,” Drescher said. “What happens to us is important. What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labour.”

She shook her fists in indignation. “I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us!” she continued. “It is disgusting. Shame on them!”

Drescher is the latest in a long line of familiar faces — Ronald Reagan, Patty Duke and Charlton Heston among them — to run SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents tens of thousands of screen actors. But it amounts to a surprising plot twist in her long career.

As the Thursday news conference made clear, she is now a leading face of a resurgent labour movement nationally. How she handles it in the coming weeks, and possibly, months could help determine the fate of 160,000 actors.

The actors strike, which went into effect Friday, July 14, marks a crisis point for Hollywood, which has already been rocked in recent years by the pandemic and sweeping technological shifts with the rise of streaming and the steady decline of cable television and box office returns. Hollywood writers have been on strike for months, and with actors now joining them — the first time since 1960 that both are on strike at the same time — the industry will essentially grind to a halt.

Drescher, 65, has spent decades acting in Hollywood, both in television and film. Since her starring role on The Nanny in the 1990s, by far her most prominent role, she has appeared sporadically in television and feature films. She most recently starred in a short-lived sitcom for NBC called Indebted, which lasted 12 episodes before it was cancelled in 2020.

She has long expressed concerns about corporate greed, captioning photos with slogans like “STOP CAPITALIST GREED NOW.” It was enough for New York Magazine to put a headline on a 2017 blog post, “Your New Favourite Anti-Capitalist Icon Is Fran Drescher.”

A few years later, in 2021, Drescher won election to the guild presidency in a deeply contested race versus actor Matthew Modine. They represented different factions: Drescher for the establishment Unite for Strength Party, and Modine for an upstart group, Membership First.

The race become so bitter that Modine accused Drescher of spreading falsehoods about him and reportedly said, “I’m ashamed of Fran Drescher, I’m disappointed. But she’ll be judged by the people in the world after she’s gone, or by whatever God she worships.”

Unlike the screenwriters, who have gone on strike many times over the decades and historically been unified, actors have been known more for their intramural squabbling. Hollywood had been bracing for a writers strike since the beginning of the year — but few senior executives and producers were prepared for the actors to have the resolve to go through with it.

When Drescher came into power, she vowed to bring the union together and to bring an end to the “dysfunctional division in this union.”

When the actors agreed to a strike authorization, it was with 97.9 per cent of the vote — a stunning figure that even eclipsed the writers’ significant strike authorization. Last month, Membership First, the opposition party, endorsed Drescher’s re-election bid.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.