Actors strike, the protest leader is Fran Drescher, Francesca Cacace of the Tata- Corriere.it

In the Italian version of the series “La tata”, Francesca Cacace was an exuberant thirty-year-old of Ciociarian origins (in the American version she was called Fran Fine and of Polish Jewish origins) who one day knocks on the door of a house in Queens to sell cosmetics and finds herself to be a nanny to the three children of a wealthy widower. The sixty-five-year-old actress Fran Drescher, who in addition to playing Francesca in the nineties wrote the series together with her then husband with references to her real life (her parents and her dog participated in the show in minor roles), now the leaders of the film and TV actors’ union who joined the screenwriters’ strike that has been going on since May 2, paralyzing Hollywood. They claim more copyright and image rights in streaming and are concerned about the use of artificial intelligence. Drescher’s speech announcing the strike yesterday in Los Angeles went viral. Next, she asked fellow members of the SAG-AFTRA union (a merger of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) to pose for photos with clenched fists raised. “The eyes of the world, and above all of the world of work, are on us,” she said. “What is happening to us is happening in all fields of work… All the trade unions in the world are on our side”.

At the root of the protest there is also greater unity among Hollywood actor unions and the rise of labor activism in post-Covid America. 98% of SAG-AFTRA members were ready to strike. A thousand stars including Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence had written a letter asking the union not to compromise, after a video released in late June on the eve of the expiry of the contract in which Drescher appeared a little too optimistic. It hasn’t happened since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild, that Hollywood stars and screenwriters went on strike together. Drescher is the latest in a series of well-known faces (including Reagan and Charlton Heston among others) to lead the union which represents 160,000 film and TV actors. In 2017, she was called “your favorite anti-capitalist” by New York Magazine. But in recent days she had received criticism because in the final stages of the negotiations with the studios she was in Puglia at the Dolce Gabbana fashion shows and had posed with Kim Kardashian on social media (as Francesca Cacace certainly would have done). The union defended her: “she was she to work, she participated in the negotiations via zoom every day”. The actress herself spoke about it at a press conference: “Makeup and hairdressing three hours a day, I walked in high heels on the cobblestones. And all this work, not play.”