American actress Louise Fletcher, Oscar winner for her role as a chilling nurse in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, died Friday in France at the age of 88, American media reported.
Louise Fletcher, who had two sons, died at her home in Montdurausse in the south of France, according to Variety and Deadline, citing sources in her entourage.
She had received the Oscar for best actress for her performance in Milos Forman’s multiple award-winning film (1975), inspired by Ken Kesey’s novel and set in a psychiatric hospital, in competition that year once morest the French Isabelle Adjani in “The Story of Adele H.”
In this film which also earned her the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for best actress, Louise Fletcher is Mildred Ratched, “Nurse Ratched”, head nurse. She confronts Randall P. McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, who feigns madness and is committed to escape prison.
The film, almost documentary in its depiction of the hospital’s brutal methods, chronicles the insolent fake patient’s attempted rebellion, a role that also won Jack Nicholson an Oscar.
With her starched white blouse, her irremovable puffy hairstyle, her cold blue gaze and her implacably soft voice, Louise Fletcher embodies all the cruelty of the psychiatric institution.
In 2003, an American Film Institute ranking named the nurse one of cinema’s most heinous “villain” or “villain” roles, surpassed only by Hannibal Lecter (“The Silence of the Lambs”), Norman Bates ( “Psychosis”), Darth Vader (“Star Wars”) and the Wicked Witch of the West (“The Wizard of Oz”).
“You hated me so much that you’re rewarding me for it,” she joked as she accepted her statuette.
However, it is not for this joke that his little acceptance speech has gone down in the history of the Oscars ceremony, lavish in tears and outbursts of all kinds.
Daughter of deaf parents, Louise Fletcher had thanked them by doubling in sign language these remarks, said with a strangled voice: “Thank you for having taught me to have dreams”.
In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2018, the actress tells how, when she accompanied her mother to the cinema, she explained the plot to her in this language.
In the same interview, she explains that, eventually convincing Milos Forman who wanted her very hard, she wanted to deliver a more complex interpretation of “Nurse Ratched”.
Louise Fletcher saw in her a nurse who was all the more formidable because she was convinced that her vocation was noble and her actions just. She had also imagined a woman strongly attracted to the character played by Jack Nicholson.
“She takes care of (the) patients and they have to pretend that they are happy to take medicine or listen to this music (played for them). So that she herself feels happy to be who she is”, deciphered Louise Fletcher.
She was at the time of shooting in the film an almost unknown actress, married to a producer and having for several years deserted the sets to take care of her children.
Without finding a role of the same scale, she subsequently played in films like “The Player” by Robert Altman or “The Exorcist 2”, and turned in series like “The Incorruptibles” or “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”.
Louise Fletcher starred in two episodes of Netflix’s “Girlboss” once more in 2017, according to IMDb.com.
