LOUISE FLETCHER

(22 July 1934 - 23 September 2022)

Just mentioning the name Louise Fletcher will recall for most cinemagoers her Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This was Milos Forman’s 1975 version of the Ken Kesey novel set in a mental institution where head nurse Mildred Ratched rules the roost with an iron-clad fist and an unfeeling attitude not at all in tune with her patients and their problems. One inmate, Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), previously detained in an Oregon work farm for raping a teenage girl, pleads insanity so that he can be transferred to her mental ward thereby avoiding hard labour.

The film presents a cross-section of different mental states with McMurphy trying to get the best out of Ratched by rebelling against her authority. Although the audience roots for McMurphy, the acting of Louise Fletcher as an unknowingly monstrous figure is outstanding in both its severity and subtlety and was arguably the best part the actress ever played. She gave the role a certain humanity, warped as it might have been, by thinking that as she was in charge of these people, they ought to be grateful for her care and attention. The film won five Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best screenplay, best actor (Nicholson) and best actress (Fletcher) and also won Golden Globe and Bafta awards. At the Oscar ceremony, Fletcher used sign language in her acceptance speech in order to thank her parents.

Louise Fletcher, who has died aged 88, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to the Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopalian missionary, and his wife Estelle. Both parents were deaf and it was thought at one time that their daughter might also be. She in fact became their voice, even though Louise’s father himself founded forty churches for the deaf. After studying drama at the University of North Carolina, the actress began her career in 1958 on television. Her first feature was A Gathering of Eagles (1963), Delbert Mann’s Air Force drama set during the Cold War, with Rock Hudson and Rod Taylor, after which Fletcher carried on working in television and also took time out to raise her family.

Her second film was Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), set in the 1930s and detailing the downbeat story of young criminals on the run, starring Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall. After One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Fletcher played the psychiatrist Dr Gene Tuskin in John Boorman’s critically crucified Exorcist II: The Heretic. She continued to appear in many films, some good, others not so good, the best of which were Neil Simon’s spoof mystery The Cheap Detective with Peter Falk, The Lady in Red with Pamela Sue Martin, Brainstorm, famed as Natalie Wood’s last film, Firestarter, a Stephen King adaptation, Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars, and Jeffrey Bloom’s Flowers in the Attic.

Highlights of Fletcher’s career from the 1990s would include Kathryn Bigelow’s action-thriller Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis, Robert Altman’s The Player (as herself), Mario Van Peebles’ Love Kills, Roger Kumble’s Cruel Intensions, and A Map of the World with Sigourney Weaver and Julianne Moore. She worked on films until 2011 and on TV till 2017.

Louise Fletcher was married to the producer and literary agent Jerry Bick from 1960 until they divorced in 1978. They have two sons, John and Andrew.

MICHAEL DARVELL