SAG President Fran Drescher announced an impending SAG-AFTRA strike on Thursday. Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

By Ella Goldblum, Talya ZaxJuly 13, 2023

With the Screen Actors’ Guild formally going on strike, union president Fran Drescher is back in the spotlight.

In the lead-up to the SAG-AFTRA strike, the actor and comedian was criticized by union members for attending recent Dolce & Gabbana festivities in Italy amid critical contract talks just last weekend. She also drew ire for perceived indecisiveness in May, when she told Deadline magazine she thought the possibility of a strike was a “very big, complicated conversation.” And she raised eyebrows last year for appearing to draw a parallel between vaccine mandates and fascism in a TikTok video.

With Drescher now the face of the most dramatic actors’ strike in decades, pressure on her is sure to intensify. Here are four things to know about the Jewish star’s history with organized labor — onscreen and off.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

Drescher’s most famous character was pro-union 

Drescher is best known for starring as Fran Fine in the 1990s sitcom The Nanny, which she created and produced with her ex-husband. Fine, whose backstory Drescher based on her own, was raised in a working-class Jewish family in Queens. In one of the show’s famous episodes, she refused to cross a picket line, primarily on the grounds that doing so would hurt her family of American-Jewish union members.. 

She’s making the SAG-AFTRA strike look very, very Jewish

Drescher announced SAG-AFTRA’s intention to strike in an impassioned speech Thursday that immediately had viewers comparing her to union heroes of the past — real and fictional. Vulture compared her to Norma Rae Webster, the fictional heroine of the 1979 film Norma Rae, written by Jewish screenwriters Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch. One Twitter user drew a link between her and Clara Lemlich, the pioneering Jewish labor activist who led the 1910 garment workers’ strike. And Drescher peppered her Thursday speech with Yiddishisms, saying the major Hollywood studios at the table have acted like what her “mother called a leck and a schmeck.”

She’s interested in a more political contemporary Nanny reboot

Speaking to TV Insider in January, Drescher mused over what a reboot of her trademark show might look like in 2023, 30 years after it premiered. Fran Fine, she said, “was hellbent on getting married,” but in the 2020s, she’d envision Fine carving her “own independent path” and expressing herself “separately and apart” from a husband and children. 

She would also focus on the character’s “politics” — a natural extension of Fine’s grounding in Drescher’s own life. “If I didn’t have that instinct to challenge authority and keep looking for something that makes more sense to me,” she told Vanity Fair in 2022, “I’d probably not be alive today.”

She’s supported labor-friendly and ‘revolutionary’ politics

In 2016, Drescher criticized Bernie Sanders for what she deemed his shift toward the center as a Democratic party candidate: “You don’t run as a Democrat if you’re really revolutionary,” she told Jezebel. And in 2020, she appeared to endorse the idea of a general strike on Twitter, writing “When profit is at the expence [sic] of all things of true value, we gotta problem.”

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 22.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make a Passover Gift Today!

$90 $180

$360

Other amount