Fran Drescher

Francine Joy Drescher was born on September 30, 1957, in Queens, New York, the younger of two daughters of Sylvia Drescher, a bridal consultant, and Morty Drescher, a naval systems analyst. Her family is Jewish, with roots in Southeast and Central Europe, including a maternal great-grandmother who emigrated from Focșani, Romania, and paternal relatives from Poland. Drescher attended Parsons Junior High School and then Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens, where her classmates included comedian Ray Romano and her future husband, Peter Marc Jacobson. She graduated from Hillcrest in 1975 and was a first runner-up for Miss New York Teenager in 1973. Drescher and Jacobson subsequently enrolled at Queens College, City University of New York, but left after their first year when acting classes were unavailable to them, turning instead to cosmetology school. The two married in 1978 and divorced in 1999.

Drescher's screen career began with a small role as dancer Connie in the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, in which she delivered a line directly to John Travolta's character. She followed that with appearances in American Hot Wax and the horror film Stranger in Our House, both in 1978, and took on a dramatic role in Miloš Forman's Ragtime in 1981. Throughout the 1980s she worked steadily as a character actress, appearing in Gorp, The Hollywood Knights, Doctor Detroit, This Is Spinal Tap — in which she played publicist Bobbi Flekman — and UHF, among other films. She also made guest appearances on television series including Who's the Boss, Night Court, and ALF during this period. In 1991, she co-starred in the short-lived CBS sitcom Princesses.

Her most prominent role came in 1993, when she and Jacobson created the CBS sitcom The Nanny. Drescher starred as Fran Fine, a woman who becomes the nanny to the three children of Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield, played by Charles Shaughnessy. The series ran until 1999 and earned Drescher two Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actress in a Comedy Television Series. During the show's run she also appeared in Jack, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and The Beautician and the Beast, for which she served as executive producer. She reprised her Spinal Tap character of Bobbi Flekman in a 1997 episode of The Nanny, and again in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in 2025.

In the 2000s, Drescher returned to television with the sitcoms Living with Fran, in which she played a middle-aged mother living with a man half her age, and Happily Divorced, co-created with Jacobson and broadcast on TV Land beginning in 2011. Happily Divorced ran for two seasons before being cancelled in August 2013. She also guest-starred in episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent and Entourage, provided a voice for a Simpsons Halloween special, and hosted a daytime talk show, The Fran Drescher Tawk Show, in 2010. Beginning in 2012, she lent her voice to the animated Hotel Transylvania film series, a role she continued through 2022. In 2020, she starred in the NBC sitcom Indebted, and in 2025 she appeared in Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie, as the mother of Timothée Chalamet's character.

Drescher made her Broadway debut during the 2013–2014 season, appearing in Cinderella as the stepmother character Madame. On October 15, 2021, she took office as president of SAG-AFTRA, the trade union representing actors and other media professionals, having been elected by the union's national membership. She led the union through a five-month actors' strike that began on July 14, 2023, which partially overlapped with a writers' strike that had started in May of that year. In July 2024, Drescher led an additional strike against major video game publishers, which concluded in 2025.