What Grace Sheffield From The Nanny Looks Like Now
Fran Drescher created "The Nanny" after chaperoning Twiggy's kids for a day in London. "Twiggy and her husband were busy working," Drescher told the Motion Picture Association. "I start schlepping their little daughter with me. She's an 11 or 12-year-old proper little British schoolgirl taking me around to all the sites of that I want to see. All of a sudden she says to me, 'Oh Fran, my new shoes are hurting me!' So I said to her, 'Honey, step on the backs of them!' She says, 'Won't that break them?' I said, 'Break them in!'"
From that moment with Twiggy's daughter, "The Nanny" was born. Drescher starred as Fran Fine, a cosmetics sales girl who winds up nannying the three children of widowed Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield: the shy Maggie (Nicholle Tom), impish Brighton (Benjamin Salisbury) and deeply anxious Grace (Madeline Zima).
Grace started the show in therapy, intellectualizing the trauma of losing her mother and acting way too old for her age. Fran gets her to loosen up and be a kid for once. She also wound up adopting the most Fran-isms — becoming conversant in Yiddish, guilting people at a Jewish mother level, and even dressing as Fran in the Season 3 episode "The Two Mrs. Sheffields." Zima started the show at age 8, but she's been working steadily ever since "The Nanny" wrapped in 1999.
Madeline Zima has worked with David Duchovny and David Lynch
Madeline Zima still works in Hollywood. She appeared in one episode of HBO's "Hacks" as Jules, a frenemy of Hannah Einbinder's Ava. When Ava runs into her old writing partners in Vegas, it's up to Jules to let Ava know that she's persona non grata in LA because she was self-centered, not because she told an offensive joke.
Zima featured in Season 2 of "Heroes" as Gretchen, the college chum of Claire (Hayden Panettiere). Gretchen comes out as bisexual, and develops romantic tension with Claire. Having any LGBTQIA+ representation on a show as big as "Heroes" was rare at the time. Zima also starred in the first two seasons of "Californication" as the manipulative Mia Lewis.
Zima also had a memorable part in David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: The Return." She is killed off in a gory and brutal fashion early in the series' first episode. The show opens with a man being paid to watch a glass box in a warehouse. Zima's character, Tracey, shows up and sleeps with the man. This momentary lapse in attention somehow lets something out of the box which kills the lovers. Zima extolled the virtues of working with Lynch to Vulture, saying "So many TV shows leave you as a participant completely out of it. David really invites everybody to lean in to use their own brains and come to their own conclusions about things."