Fran Drescher thinks “The Nanny,” in which she plays an openly Jewish character, will have no problems now, despite the rise of anti-Semitism in 2024.
“I think everyone identifies with that show,” she exclusively told Page Six at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night.
The 66-year-old actress also noted the film’s success in Muslim countries. “It’s massive across the Middle East,” she added. “All through the Arab countries, Jordan, Egypt and the Emirates.”
Drescher said the sitcom, which ran from 1993 to 1999, was so popular because it “transcended religion” and people could “sympathize” with it.
She told us: “The universal message of the series is that it doesn’t matter what you look like and how you sound, it’s what your heart is like and I think that’s a powerful message. results in any decade.”
The SAG-AFTRA president added that it was initially difficult to get the show on the air.
“I was the first Jewish actress to star in a primetime television series in which I played an openly Jewish character since 1948 (Gertrude Berg starred in ‘The Goldbergs’). With ‘The Nanny,’ they said they could sell the show to Procter & Gamble if ‘The Nanny’ was Italian and not Jewish.”
But she refused to change her character’s identity.
“I don’t like to live with regrets,” she said on “The Originals” podcast in 2020, “and I don’t want to rush into doing something to get the job and then when it doesn’t work out or fails, I kicked myself because I thought ‘Why don’t we just follow our instincts? Why do we listen to them?’”
She added: “I thought, ‘I can’t live with that regret. I knew this character needed to be written very closely to me and all the rich and wonderful characters I grew up with.”
Drescher says that she and her then-husband and producing partner, Peter Marc Jacobson, “gathered our courage and said, ‘No, Fran Fine has to be Jewish.’”Other celebrities at the annual DC-based event called “The Nerd Prom” included Sophia Bush, making her red carpet debut with girlfriend Ashlyn Harris, Molly Ringwald, Chris Pine, Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost.
