After a day of sweating on the picket lines leading Hollywood actors in their ongoing strike, SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher at least has a stunning ocean view to come home to.
Drescher is leading the actors’ union in a joint strike with writers, marking Hollywood’s biggest labor dispute in sixty years and halting film and TV production.
Drescher’s own career has spanned decades in film, television and Broadway, but she is most famous for starring in the ’90s sitcom The Nanny, which she created with her husband Peter Marc Jacobson – who later came out as gay.
She reportedly earned $1.5 million per episode during the show’s final season, making her one of the highest-paid actresses on TV at the time, while her net worth is estimated at between $25 million and $30 million.
In the late ’90s, she moved from the East Coast to Malibu for a fresh start after her separation from Jacobson and eventual divorce, and has lived in the same three-bedroom spread out on an ocean-view terrace ever since.
After sweating it out on the picket lines leading the ongoing strike by Hollywood actors, SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher may be heading back to her Malibu mansion.
Drescher leads the actors’ union in joint strike with writers, marking Hollywood’s biggest labor dispute in sixty years
The home last sold for $1.2 million in 1997, property records show, but is now worth about $6 million, according to an appraisal by real estate site Zillow.
In a 2020 interview with the New York Post, Drescher spoke about how the Malibu home became a sanctuary after her divorce and subsequent battle with uterine cancer.
‘It was my first big purchase,’ she said. ‘It was quite scary but that was the journey I was on: to define myself independently of marriage and discover who I am without anyone else asking, ‘What do you think, honey?’
Now, the Malibu mansion is Drescher’s retreat from a different kind of battle, as he leads the actors’ union in a dispute with studio bosses over a new three-year contract.
To begin their work stoppage, the actors joined the Writers Guild of America, which began its own strike on May 2. The collective action effectively halted all film production in Hollywood.
Both unions say the streaming model that has taken over the industry in recent years has cheated them out of a share of revenue and funneled money to executives.
No negotiations are planned, and there is no end in sight for the work stoppage. Both guilds walked off the set for the first time since 1960, when then-actor Ronald Reagan was SAG’s leader.
On Friday, the first full day of the actors’ walkout, top film and TV actors joined picket lines alongside screenwriters in Los Angeles and New York.
In the late ’90s, she moved from the East Coast to Malibu for a fresh start after her separation from Jacobson and eventual divorce, and she’s stayed in the same three-bedroom with a sprawling ocean-view terrace ever since.
The home last sold for $1.2 million in 1997, property records show, but is now worth about $6 million, according to an appraisal by real estate site Zillow.
In a 2020 interview with the New York Post, Drescher spoke about how the Malibu home became a sanctuary after her divorce and subsequent battle with uterine cancer.
Drescher joined union rank-and-file in a picket outside Netflix’s offices in Hollywood.
“The jig is up,” Drescher said at SAG’s press conference Thursday. ‘The entire business model has been changed by streaming, digital, AI. If we don’t stand tall now, we’re all going to be in trouble.’
Among those on the picket line were Jason Sudeikis, Rosario Dawson, Zoe Kazan, Olivia Wilde, Paul Dano and other top film and TV actors.
Drescher joined union rank-and-file in a picket outside Netflix’s offices in Hollywood, alongside Lord of the Rings star Sean Astin, Guardians of the Galaxy Sean Gunn and Titanic actor Frances Fisher.
“The jig is up,” Drescher said at SAG’s press conference Thursday. ‘The entire business model has been changed by streaming, digital, AI. If we don’t stand tall now, we’re all going to be in trouble.’
Since that fiery rally speech, Drescher has been at the center of Hollywood’s fight for higher pay and historic labor action.
Off screen, the Queens-born 65-year-old is known for her firebrand anti-capitalist views, and has overcome horrific experiences in a previous life — from rape at gunpoint to battling womb cancer.
Drescher’s acting career also got off to a rough start during his college days, when he came close to following a very different path.
According to a 1996 interview with Redbook, Drescher dropped out of Queens College of the City University of New York as a first-year student because all the acting classes were full, and she took a course in cosmetology instead.
But she managed to secure her first role as a dancer in the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever, where she asked John Travolta’s character: ‘Are you as good in bed as you are on the dance floor?’
The following year, she starred in several more films, including American Hot Wax and Summer of Fear.
In the 1980s, Drescher appeared in films such as Gorp, The Hollywood Nights, Doctor Detroit, The Big Picture, UHF, and Cadillac Man.
His most memorable role was as publicist Bobby Fleckman in the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap – a character that also made a cameo in the fifth season of Drescher’s The Nanny.
Drescher created the sitcom in 1993 with Jacobson, his high school sweetheart to whom he was married for 21 years. It aired on CBS until 1999.
Reprising the role of Fran Fine, who becomes the nanny of four children before wooing their widowed father, Drescher reached a new level of fame.
She reportedly earned $1.5 million per episode during the show’s final season, making her one of the highest-paid actresses on TV at the time.
The 1990s saw her star in several other films, including Francis Ford Coppola’s 1996 film Jack and the following year’s The Beautician and the Beast – which she also produced.
In 2000 she starred in Picking Up the Peace alongside Woody Allen, before voicing Pearl in the 2006 animation Shark Bay.
In 2010 Drescher returned to television with her own daytime chat show, The Fran Drescher Talk Show, although it was suspended after a trial period.
New York-born Drescher, who has long expressed views on the political left, estimates his net worth at $25 million to $30 million.
Semi-autobiographical: Drescher got her big break creating and playing nasally-voiced bridal shop salesgirl-turned-careworker Fran Fine on CBS for six seasons spanning 1993-1999.
The following year, he created the sitcom Happily Divorced with Jacobson, who by then had come out as gay, and the pair had split.
As part of the show’s promotion, Drescher performed weddings for three same-sex couples in New York City using a minister’s license from the Universal Life Church.
He chose the couples through a contest he started on Facebook called ‘Fran Drescher’s ‘Love is Love’ Gay Marriage Contest”, based on the origin story of their relationship and how it evolved.
Drescher moved to Broadway in 2014, playing stepmother Madame for a 10-week run in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s revival of Cinderella.
Most recently, she reprized a recurring role in Adam Sandler’s Hotel Transylvania film series, where she provided the voice of Eunice.
Offstage, 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.
Drescher said he didn’t know Jacobson, whom he met when they were both just 15, was gay, because they had a very active sex life — which he said in 2015.
In an exclusive interview with Newstimesuk.com last year, Drescher revealed that she will never marry again and that she plans to grow old with Jacobson because ‘we still love each other’. He is also a vocal supporter of LGBT rights.
Drescher joined the cast in a picket outside the Netflix offices in Los Angeles, California on Friday – their first day of work on the show.
The couple faced a terrifying ordeal in their late 20s, when two burglars broke into their Los Angeles home, stole their belongings and raped Drescher and a female friend at gunpoint.
Jacobson was also assaulted, 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 to tell her story to the press.
In 2020, she revealed how her photographic memory helped police identify her rapist – who was on parole at the time – and sent him to prison for life.
Drescher informally remarried in 2014, to Indian-American engineer Shiva Ayyadurai at his beach house.
Both said they were 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’.
After two years, the couple got separated.
Drescher also battled uterine cancer in the early 2000s, which she wrote about in her book, Cancer Smearner, aimed at raising awareness of the early signs of the disease.
She was admitted to Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles in June 2000 for an immediate radical hysterectomy that cured her of the disease.
On the seventh anniversary of her operation, Drescher announced the launch of the Cancer Schmancer Movement, a charity that aims to ensure women’s cancer is diagnosed at an early stage.
As an outspoken advocate for health care, Drescher helped unanimously pass the Johannes Act through Congress to improve cancer education, and the Bush administration appointed her a diplomat for women’s health.
He traveled the world in roles working with companies in Romania, Hungary, Serbia and Poland.
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