AUGUST 2019 InSTYLE 63Fr a n -
Ta s t i c
TWO DECADES AFTER
THE NANNY WRAPPED,
FRAN DRESCHER IS
STRONGER THAN EVERe all make plans for what we want
our future to be. That’s, like,
American Life 101. You’ve got to plan
your play and play your plan, but no one has a crystal ball.
When life bites you in the ass one random Tuesday
afternoon and everything as you knew it changes forever,
you’re going to kick and scream and say, “Why me? This
wasn’t supposed to happen.”
You end up grappling with what to do, because the plan
is no longer in play. It’s extremely discombobulating, but at
some point you’re going to have to choose what path you
want to take. Either you’re going to stay bitter about what
will never be or you’re going to deal with your new reality
as courageously and elegantly as you possibly can. That
was the path I chose.
In 1985 I was living in Los Angeles working as an actress
when I was raped at gunpoint [during a home invasion].Afterward, I didn’t really get into my feelings or my
vulnerabilities. I never wanted to come off as “weak,” so I
just kind of buried it and got on with life. For the next 15
years I focused on working extra hard, making everybody
else happy and being a caregiver. I was busy with The
Nanny, and I lived in the oxygen-thin air of other people
saying how hard I worked and how nice I was. Then the
show ended in 1999, and a year later I was diagnosed with
uterine cancer. It was strange—and kind of poetic—that my
reproductive organs, of all things, had cancer. 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 vulnerabili-
ties, my pain from the rape lodged itself in my uterus. No
one else around me had cancer. That was a rude awakening.
At that point I realized that I had to lose my Superwoman
complex. I told myself, “You’re not Superwoman. You walk