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Fran Drescher
Francine Joy Drescher was born on September 30th, 1957 in Flushing, Queens, New York. She is of Russian and Italian decent and she is Jewish. She has one older sister named Nadine. Her parents Morty and Sylvia were the inspiration for the characters of the same name in her hit TV series The Nanny. She was a huge fan of I Love Lucy growing up and her comedic talent is largely inspired by Lucille Ball. She attended Hillcrest High School and was a high achieving student. Her high school boyfriend, who she met when she was fifteen years old, Peter Marc Jacobson, was also an aspiring actor and the two would often travel to auditions together, they also attended beauty school together so that they would have a means of supporting themselves if acting did not work out. She had an early love of entertaining and while her drama teachers often told her she was talented, she was advised to take lessons to rid herself of her heavy Queens, New York accent. Ironically, her accent, which she did indeed rid herself of, after many speech lessons, later became her most valuable asset. Her first major film role came in 1977 when she had a small part in the enormously popular box office hit, Saturday Night Fever. In 1985 she experienced tragic violence in her Los Angeles apartment. She and a friend were raped at gunpoint by men who had broken into the apartment for a burglary. It was a devastating experience for the actress and it took her many years to reconcile the trauma she experienced from it. Although she tried to keep the incident from the media, word leaked out and she subsequently agreed to an interview with Larry King explaining her feelings on the subject. She stated to King that she felt it was important to take the negativity of the experience and turn it into something positive; seeing her attackers sent to prison was that positive experience for her as was helping other woman overcome the same ordeal. She appeared in many other movies in the years following Saturday Night Fever and before her hit show The Nanny began airing, including: American Hot Wax, Ragtime, Doctor Detroit, This is Spinal Tap, It had to Be You, The Big Picture and Cadillac Man. While on a visit to friend, model Twiggy, in London she came up with the story line for The Nanny. The show eventually aired CBS in 1993 and was a huge success. Fran Fine and her whiny, high-pitched voice, endeared herself to international audiences and so did Fran Drescher; her physical, Lucille Ball type comedy kept audiences laughing for six long years. The show aired its last episode in 1999. During the long run of The Nanny, Fran continued to appear in big screen films including Jack, The Beautician and the Beast and Picking Up the Pieces. In her personal life she married her high school sweetheart, Peter Marc Jacobson in 1978. The couple divorced in 1999. She has written several books and continues to act in various television and movie roles. In 2000 she was diagnosed with uterine cancer and needed emergency surgery which she survived without incident. In typical Fran fashion, she turned this negative into a positive and wrote a book about her experience called Cancer Shmancer. Tidbits
Sites Fran Drescher Online Fran Drescher at StarPulse.com Fran Drescher Fan Site Fran Drescher Picture Galleries | |||||||||||||||||
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