From the WGA strike in May to the “historic director’s deal,” Hollywood has been in turmoil in recent months, and now actors are joining the fight against predatory CEOs.
SAG-AFTRA is the world’s largest performer and broadcasters union, representing over 160,000 media artists. It is a merger of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. This union is driving the actor’s strike in the United States.
During the strikes, though, you may have seen a lot of footage of SAG president Fran Drescher. But who is she, and have you ever seen her before? Continue reading for more information.
Drescher, who was born in 1957, rose to popularity as an actress in the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with modest roles in films such as Saturday Night Fever and This Is Spinal Tap.
Fran Fine in the classic CBS sitcom The Nanny, which she co-created with her then-husband Peter Marc Jacobson, is her most notable performance to date. Drescher’s role, according to Sony Pictures, was a working-class girl “with a face out of Vogue and a voice out of Queens who stumbles onto the opportunity to become nanny to the children of a wealthy widower.” Drescher received two Emmy and two Golden Globe nods for her work on the sitcom, which aired from 1993 until 1999.
Fran Fine, on the other hand, was an enthusiastic strike supporter, and one famous scene from the program features her refusing to cross a picket line with her boss, Mr Sheffield. “My mother had three rules: never make contact with a public toilet; never, ever, ever cross a picket line; and what was the third one?” she tells Sheffield. Oh, and don’t wear musk oil to the zoo.”
Drescher has also appeared on Living with Fran and voices a character in the Hotel Transylvania film series.
Drescher now appears to devote the majority of her time to activism, whether it’s pushing cancer research, criticizing oil drilling and pharmaceutical companies, or, of course, fighting for actor’s rights.
Drescher was elected SAG president in 2021 following a campaign against actor Matthew Modine. Her campaign centered on dealing with the union’s “dysfunctional division,” and she told Deadline that “reunification as one great and powerful SAG-AFTRA body is the only way to frontline for empowering and protecting members.”
She is now leading the charge in the SAG-AFTRA strikes, which began last week after attempts to negotiate salary and working conditions between the union and major Hollywood companies failed. As part of the strike, actors are unable to work on large feature films or scripted television, and they are unable to promote any of their projects that are covered by their current contracts.
As Drescher said in a speech, “We had no choice. We are the victims here. We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it. Quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things. How they plead our money, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them.”
She has also been a large voice of support for the current Writer’s Guild strikes, stating (via CBS News), “What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor by means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.”
