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Louise Fletcher Dies: Oscar-Winning ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ Actor Was 88 - Deadline
Sep 24, 2022 1 min, 41 secs

Louise Fletcher, whose Oscar-winning performance as the sadistic Nurse Ratched in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest gave Hollywood one of its greatest all-time villains and provided the culture with a portrait of bureaucratic evil so indelible that the character’s last name could carry a TV series 45 years later, died Friday at her home in Montdurausse, France.

It was her performance in the latter film that drew the interest of director Miloš Forman, who was in the process of casting his film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the 1962 Ken Kesey novel set in a mental institution and focusing on the conflict between a man feigning insanity to avoid prison and the domineering head nurse who demands conformity and obedience at all costs.

The director reportedly made offers to, among others, Colleen Dewhurst, Ellen Burstyn, Anne Bancroft and Geraldine Page before deciding he had found his tyrannical Mildred Ratched in Fletcher.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was an immediate critical and box office hit, and would sweep the year’s Oscars by winning the awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Leading Actor, Best Leading Actress and, for the work of Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, Best Screenplay.

In winning her Oscar, Fletcher became only the third woman to win the Academy Award, the BAFTA Award and the Golden Globe Award for a single performance.

So indelible was her portrayal that in 2020, the Ryan Murphy-Evan Romansky Netflix series Ratched — a prequel of sorts to the novel and film, with Sarah Paulson in the starring role — would need only the single-word title to evoke the sense of dread and cruelty conveyed by Fletcher decades earlier.

The impact of the Oscar win was, she later recalled, exhilarating but fleeting.

“I got the Oscar when I was 41,” said Fletcher, then 60.

A career revival began just a few years later when, in 1993, she landed the recurring role of the devious Bajoran religious leader Kai Winn Adami on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

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