American actress Louise Fletcher has passed away, best known for her portrayal of the cruel Nurse Mildred Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a role for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1976.
Her agent announced that Fletcher died at her home in Montdurausse, France, without specifying the cause. She was 88 years old.
Louise Fletcher was born in Alabama and began her career in the late 1950s with several television series.
After dedicating several years to her family, she returned to acting in the mid-1970s, when director Miloš Forman cast her as the stern and at times cruel nurse in charge of the psychiatric hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson.
For her performance, Fletcher won the Academy Award, the Golden Globe, and the BAFTA for Best Actress.
In total, the film won five Academy Awards, all in major categories: Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and both Best Actor and Actress.
Career
A professional actress since 1958, she began her career in various television series, including Perry Mason and Wagon Train, and had an uncredited role in the film A Gathering of Eagles (1963) directed by Delbert Mann.
Her career took a pause after her marriage to producer Jerry Bick but resumed in 1973 with Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1973).
She gained international fame in 1975 with Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Her portrayal of the villainous Nurse Mildred Ratched, whose inflexible and repressive methods lead a young neurotic to commit suicide, earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress, as well as the BAFTA and the Golden Globe. At the Oscar ceremony, she thanked her parents in her speech using American Sign Language.
She later worked in other films, such as The Cheap Detective (1978) by Robert Moore, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) by John Boorman, Invaders from Mars (1986) by Tobe Hooper, Two Moon Junction (1988) by Zalman King, Blue Steel (1989) by Kathryn Bigelow, and The Player (1992) by Robert Altman. However, her public image remained indelibly linked to Forman’s film.
From 1993 to 1999, she appeared in 14 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the third live-action television series of the Star Trek franchise, in the role of Winn Adami, a “Vedek,” a Bajoran religious leader and follower of an orthodox faction of the Bajoran Prophets’ Cult. Her character is a cunning and ambitious figure who, after becoming the “Kai” (the highest Bajoran religious figure), seeks to gain political power by converting to the evil Pah-wraiths’ cult, only to be eventually defeated and killed by Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo).
Her role earned her four Online Film & Television Association awards: in 1997 for Best Guest Actress in a Syndicated Series and Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series; in 1998 and 1999 for Best Guest Actress in a Syndicated Series; plus a nomination in 1999 for Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series.
She also received two Emmy Award nominations for her appearances in the TV series Picket Fences (1996) and Joan of Arcadia (2004).
In 2005, she appeared in three episodes of the television series ER as Roberta “Birdie” Chadwick.
Louise Fletcher passed away at her home in Montdurausse, France, on September 23, 2022.
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