"The Nanny" star Fran Drescher may have played a caregiver to three on-screen children, but in real life she never had kids of her own — and she sometimes regrets that.
"I think I would have been a good mom,” she told The Cut, “and sometimes I think I kind of missed out on that.”
Drescher, 62, was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2000, 15 years after being raped at gunpoint during a home invasion. As part of her cancer treatment, she underwent a hysterectomy.
"It was strange — and kind of poetic — that my reproductive organs, of all things, had cancer," she wrote in a 2019 essay for InStyle. "But it was also an amazing affirmation that pain finds its way to exactly the right place in the body if you don’t deal with it.
"Since I hadn’t been paying attention to my own vulnerabilities, my pain from the rape lodged itself in my uterus. No one else around me had cancer. That was a rude awakening," she added.
Once she was in remission, Drescher began a phase she called Life After Cancer that found her penning a memoir, starting a cancer foundation and becoming a women's health advocate.
"Suddenly I was a person who couldn’t have children. But I gave birth to a book, 'Cancer Schmancer,' and launched a movement with the goal of transforming people from patients into medical consumers," she wrote.
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Now, 21 years after "The Nanny" went off the air, Drescher stars in the new NBC sitcom "Indebted." She plays Debbie, a lovable, debt-ridden grandmother who's forced, along with her husband Stew (Steven Weber), to move back in with their son Dave (Adam Pally) and his family.
Though the show originally depicted Debbie as overbearing, Drescher put her own spin on the character.
"People are tuning in to see who they’re used to seeing," she told The Cut. "You want to get some heavy character actress, older woman, to be this pain in the a-- in the house and have this, you know, antagonistic relationship with the daughter-in-law like they did in 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' be my guest. But that’s not me."
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