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<\/p>\nLouise Fletcher, the sweet actress from Alabama who won an Academy Award for her turn as the heartless Nurse Ratched \u2014 one of the most reviled characters in movie history \u2014 in One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest, has died. She was 88.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Fletcher died Friday of natural causes at her home in Montdurausse, France, her son Andrew Bick told The Hollywood Reporter. She had survived two bouts with breast cancer.<\/p>\n
A daughter of deaf parents \u2014 she made one of the most touching acceptance speeches in Oscar history \u2014 Fletcher also starred as a psychiatrist in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and played opposite Peter Falk amid the star-studded ensemble in The Cheap Detective (1978).<\/p>\n
On television, she portrayed the religious leader Kai Winn Adami on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and received Emmy nominations in 1996 and 2004 for her guest-starring stints on Picket Fences and Joan of Arcadia, respectively.<\/p>\n
She more recently played William H. Macy\u2018s meth-dealing mother on Shameless and appeared in the Liev Schreiber film A Perfect Man (2013) and on the Netflix series Girlboss, starring Britt Robertson.<\/p>\n
After spending more than a decade away from show business to raise her two sons, Fletcher returned to Hollywood and appeared opposite Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall in the Robert Altman film Thieves Like Us (1974).<\/p>\n
Director Milos Forman, then casting 1975\u2019s One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest \u2014 based on Ken Kesey\u2019s 1962 book about life in an Oregon psychiatric hospital \u2014 spotted her in that movie.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was watching it to look at Shelley Duvall to play one of the girls who comes on the ward on the party night, and there I was,\u201d Fletcher recalled in a 2016 interview. \u201cHe said, \u2018Who is that?\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n
A year later, after Anne Bancroft, Angela Lansbury, Geraldine Page, Colleen Dewhurst and Ellen Burstyn all rejected the chance to play Nurse Ratched \u2014 many believing that the character was too impossibly wicked \u2014 Forman finally gave Fletcher the part.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tried out for it many, many times,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize that lots of other women were turning it down. They offered it to many movie stars who declined, luckily for me. To think, what if somebody else had said yes?\u201d<\/p>\n
In the film, the icy Ratched humiliates her patients and revokes their privileges on a whim. When she can\u2019t control a new arrival, Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), she administers shock therapy on him, then has him lobotomized.
\nFletcher knew her life had changed forever when she watched Cuckoo\u2019s Nest with an audience for the first time and saw how people reacted to a scene in which McMurphy tries to kill her character.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was in Chicago, and it was a packed house,\u201d she recalled. \u201cWhen he strangles her, the audience stood up and yelled and cheered. Stood up. It was unbelievable. I was thrilled.\u201d<\/p>\n
On its 2003 list of the 100 greatest villains in the annals of motion pictures, the American Film Institute placed Nurse Ratched at No. 5, behind only Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader and the Wicked Witch of the West. (Sarah Paulson recently revived the character in a Ryan Murphy prequel series for Netflix.)<\/p>\n
After Fletcher heard her name called by presenter Charles Bronson and came to the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept her Oscar, she said: \u201cWell, it looks like you all hated me so much that you\u2019ve given me this award for it, and I\u2019m loving every minute of it. And all I can say is, I\u2019ve loved being hated by you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Louise Fletcher, the sweet actress from Alabama who won an Academy Award for her turn as the heartless Nurse Ratched \u2014 one of the most reviled characters in movie history \u2014 in One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest, has died. She was 88. Fletcher died Friday of natural causes at her home in Montdurausse, France, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memorial"],"yoast_head":"\n