Jane Darwell

Jane Darwell has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to Motion Pictures, at 6735 Hollywood Boulevard. She attended high school with actor Ray Romano. She died from a heart attack in Woodland Hills, California and was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery. Drescher was born and raised in Queens, New York. Always popular within the film industry, her final role as the old woman feeding the birds in Mary Poppins was personally given to her by Walt Disney. She also had a role in the movie This Is Spinal Tap as Bobbie Fleckman. By the end of her career she had appeared in more than 170 films, including Huckleberry Finn (1931), Roman Scandals (1933), Jesse James, The Rains Came, Gone With the Wind (all 1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), My Darling Clementine (1946) and Caged (1950). Drescher's first role in a major motion picture was a bit part in Saturday Night Fever.

She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a role she was given at the insistence of the film's star, Henry Fonda. She wrote about her experiences in the book Cancer Schmancer. Short, stout and plain faced she was quickly cast in a succession of films usually as the mother of one of the major characters. Drescher was also diagnosed with uterine cancer, and it was eventually treated to remission. After a 15 year absence from films, she resumed her film career in 1930 with a role in Tom Sawyer, and her career as a Hollywood character actress began. She was paraphrased as saying in an interview with Larry King that although it was a very negative experience, she found ways to chalk her experience into something positive; she saw her rapist sent to prison. She appeared in almost twenty films over the next two years before returning to the stage. It took her many years to overcome this obstacle, and it took her even longer to admit this to the press.

She began her acting career in theater productions in Chicago and made her first film appearance in 1913. In 1985, robbers ransacked Drescher's apartment and raped her and one of her girlfriends. Born Patti Woodward in Palmyra, Missouri, Darwell originally intended to become a circus performer, however her family objected and she compromised by becoming an actress. In her autobiography Drescher discusses the fact that this is, in fact, her real voice, and the many voice lessons she has had to take to overcome it for movie auditions (only to have it end up being her trademark). Jane Darwell (October 15, 1879 – August 13, 1967) was an American theater and film actress. Her voice is a combination of a high nasal pitch and a New York/Jewish accent that many people find unpleasant. She is most famous for her somewhat autobiographical role as the nanny Fran Fine in The Nanny.

Fran Drescher (born September 30, 1957) is an American actress.