Small Age Gap
The actresses who played Sylvia and Yetta had a smaller age gap than viewers realized. The actresses were just five years apart! This is despite the fact that Yetta was meant to play Sylvia’s mother, who was Fran’s mother on the show. Ann Morgan Gullibert, who plated Yetta, was just five years older than Renee Taylor, who played Sylvia. Things turned out well at the end of the day, of course. Just look at how well the show did!
Small Age Gap
Too Ethnic
Fran Drescher, who is Jewish in real life, played a Jewish woman in the show. However, some sponsors, as well as some CBS executives, were worried that she was acting “too Jewish” which would hurt the show and its performance. They thought of making the character Italian instead, but Fran refused to change it. She believed that because she was Jewish in real life, her character, Fran Fine, was superior as a Jewish woman since it was based on reality. This also explains why the family she worked for was British. An executive producer explained: “The conclusion we came to was that if the family Fran worked for was British, she wouldn’t come across as Jewish so much as the American you were rooting for. The idea was to make her the American girl who happens to be Jewish rather than the Jewish girl working for the WASPs.”
Too Ethnic
