She turned her role as the tyrannical and cruel Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest into the fifth greatest villain in movie history after Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader and the Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. And she won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Bafta for it, something that until then, 1976, only Audrey Hepburn and Liza Minnelli had achieved. The daughter of deaf parents, she was the first to use sign language to thank the Oscar. However, and despite the shower of awards for her role in Milos Forman's film, Louise Fletcher's later career would be long but artistically very irregular, so much so that in addition to two Emmy nominations for Picket fences and Joan of Arcadia, she would be nominated for Worst Supporting Actress of the Year for Tobe Hooper's Invaders from Mars. Yesterday Fletcher passed away at her home in Montdurausse, France, at the age of 88.
Like all lives, his was marked by chance and conditions that were beyond his will. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1934, the daughter of deaf parents but, like her brothers, hearing, she was educated in speech by her aunt, who also taught her interpretation. Tall for her time, one meter seventy-eight, she began in the world of westerns in series such as Lawman and Maverick thanks in part to that height: "I was 1.78 and no television producer thought that a tall woman could be attractive to anyone I was able to get roles in westerns because the actors were even taller than me," he declared in 1975.
Her marriage in 1960 to the writer and producer Jerry Brick, with whom she had two children and from whom she separated in 1977, provided another great crossroads. Brick produced with her friend Robert Altman in 1974 Thieves Like Us, which he directed and in which Fletcher took part. It went so well that Altman created a new role for her in her next film, Nashville no less, but she fell out with Brick and the role ended up going to Lily Tomlin. However, Milos Forman had seen Fletcher's performance in Thieves Like Us and called it for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Where he would embroider the tyrannical incarnation of the power of Nurse Fletcher over the psychiatric patients of a hospital, among whom appears a Jack Nicholson who tries to evade prison by appearing mad.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would be followed by a long and erratic career with titles like The Exorcist II, Cheap Detective, Project Brainstorm, Eyes of Fire, Invaders from Mars, Flowers in the Attic and Cruel Intentions. She would have a recurring role in the series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from 1993 to 1999 as Kai Winn Adami, religious leader of the Bajoran, which would bring her successive awards as a supporting actress at the Online Film Awards.
