Oscar Winner Louise Fletcher Has Died At 88
Louise Fletcher, who set a new standard on playing a villain with her performance of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and is also best known to Trekkies as Kai Winn, died in her sleep yesterday at her home in Montdurausse, France. She was 88.
Louise’s agent, David Shaul, delivered the news of sadness to Deadline and said that she died in her beloved home in southern France while surrounded by her family.
Her death was announced to Deadline by her family through agent David Shaul. Although no cause was specified, Shaul said she passed away in her sleep at the home she had built from a 300-year-old farmhouse, surrounded by family. Earlier today, she said to her family about her beloved home, “I can’t believe I created something so meaningful to my well-being.”
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is what made Louise Fletcher (born name: Estelle Louise Fletcher) a STAH, but she was in the game before and long after. Louise made her professional acting debut in the late-1950s on TV and was in episodes of Lawman, Maverick, Sugarfoot, Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip, The Untouchables, Wagon Train, and The Millionaire. In 1960, Louise married producer Jerry Bick. They had two sons together: John Dashiell Bick and Andrew Wilson Bick. She took an 11-year break from acting to raise their sons. Louise and Jerry divorced in 1977.
Louise returned to acting in the 1974 Robert Altman movie Thieves Like Us, which was produced by her husband. Apparently, while writing Nashville, Robert Altman wrote the role of Linnea Reese for Louise, but then Altman and Jerry Bick had a falling out so the role went to Lily Tomlin instead. But Louise didn’t cry for long. Thieves Like Us led to her breakout role in Cuckoo’s Nest. Director Miloš Forman became interested in Louise for the role of Nurse Ratched after seeing her in Thieves Like Us, but the role was still offered to several bigger named actresses, and none wanted to touch it. Angela Lansbury, Colleen Dewhurst, Ellen Burstyn, Anne Bancroft, and Geraldine Page were all offered the role but passed on it because they didn’t want to play such a monster. After a year of meetings and auditions, Louise finally got the role and played that monster so subtly and flawlessly that future movie villains curled up at her feet before saying, “Teach us your ways.”
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was an instant hit and swept awards season that year. Louise won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the Best Actress Oscar in 1976. Almost ten years before Sally Field told the Academy “you like me” at the 1985 Oscars, Louise did the opposite. At the beginning of her acceptance speech, she said, “Well it looks like you all hated me so much that you’ve given me this award for it and I’m loving every minute of it.” Both of Louise’s parents were deaf and she ended her speech by signing a thank you to them. And just like that, my usually-dry tear ducts are filling up.
During an interview with The New York Times in 1995, Louise said that after she, Miloš, and Jack Nicholson all picked up Oscars for Cuckoo’s Nest, Miloš predicated that their next projects would be flops and he was right. via Deadline
“I got the Oscar when I was 41,” said Fletcher, then 60. “If I was 23, it would have been hard to deal with. Hell, at my age it was hard to deal with. It was like being thrown an explosive.”
In the same interview, she recalled a prophetic comment made backstage on Oscar night by the Czech-born Forman. “Milos said, ‘Now we’re all going to make flops.’ It was true. I made The Heretic — the second Exorcist — and it was a huge flop. Milos did Ragtime. And Jack did [The] Missouri Breaks. That’s Czech prophecy.”
As mentioned above, Louise followed up her Oscar win with a performance in 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic. And she went on to star in The Cheap Detective, The Lady in Red, Natural Enemies, Mama Dracula, Strange Invaders, Brainstorm, Firestarter, Nobody’s Fool, Invaders from Mars, Blue Steel, The Player, Flowers in the Attic, and the 1989 TV movie The Karen Carpenter Story (she played Karen and Richard Carpenter’s mom). Louise’s career came back up again in the 1990s when she played another ice cold villain queen, Kai Winn Adami on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
In 1996, Louise played the mom of Marlee Matlin’s character in a couple of episodes of Picket Fences and it got her an Emmy nomination. She got her second Emmy nomination in 2006 for her guest starring performance on Joan of Arcadia. And throughout the 90s and beyond, she was in the movies Cruel Intentions, Mulholland Falls, 2 Days in the Valley, and A Map of the World, and was in episodes of Wonderfalls, 7th Heaven, ER, Heroes, Private Practice, and Shameless (as Grammy Gallagher). She gave her final performance as Rosie in the 2017 Netflix show Girlboss.
Louise Fletcher brilliantly played so many villains throughout her long career (Nurse Ratched, The Grandmother in Flowers in the Attic, Kai Winn) that when she got to heaven, the angels at the gate were probably thinking, “Wait, Nurse Ratched and Kai Winn is here?” Louise Fletcher was that good at playing bad.
Rest in peace, Louise Fletcher.
Pic: Getty