![]() ![]() I’m one of those actresses who have to work for a living. ![]() Even if I don’t think something is so great, I still do it. “Frankly, how many parts are out there for people like me? I’m not going to be a person who complains about roles for women there’s a long line of people doing that. But she worked steadily, the way someone who’d been away from the job so long would, appreciating and relishing a second chance to live out a childhood dream. It didn’t make her a star, a flow of great roles didn’t come her way, certainly none that showcased her the way Nurse Ratched did. She neither completely suffered nor completely escaped the supposed Oscar Curse you win an Oscar and then everything after that is downhill (anybody out there remember poor F. But don’t expect that it’ll do anything for your career… Sure, it changes your life enormously in personal ways, but it was not a guarantee of anything. “Just enjoy it,” she said of the win, “it’ll make you wonderfully happy for a night. She landed a supporting part in Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), and then after that… One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.īut she’d been kicking around long enough to know what the Oscar meant…and what it didn’t. And doing it while she was pushing forty, in a profession forever and brutally intolerant of age on a woman. The second gutsy decision? Coming back eleven years later in a business with the memory of a housecat it would’ve been close to starting all over again. The thought of going away before they got up and coming back after they were in bed was intolerable.” “I could not handle going away day after day. Turned her back on the profession she’d dreamed about since she’d been a child because there was something more important to her: her own children. She finally made it to the big screen with a supporting part in A Gathering of Eagles (1963). “I was able to get jobs on Westerns because the actors were even taller than I was.” ![]() “I was five feet, ten inches tall, and no television producer thought a tall woman could be sexually attractive to anybody,” she said looking back on those days. No breakout performances, nothing hinting at a star on the rise, nothing like that, but she was working: The Untouchables, Perry Mason, a lot of Westerns like Lawman, Maverick, Bat Masterson, Yancy Derringer, Sugarfoot, Wagon Train… Starting in the late 1950s, she’d been working fairly steadily in television. For making the two riskiest, gutsiest, most daring decisions someone in her profession could ever make. Critically-hailed.īut I think she should be remembered for something else. “Life had stopped for her a long time ago,” Fletcher said of her character, and couldn’t seem to recognize it as anything but a threat in others.Ĭlassic performance, classic villain, classic film. Watch the movie and you never forget her in her starched nurse’s white uniform, legs neatly crossed, surrounded by the colorless mental ward she presides over like some ice queen, able to emotionally eviscerate one of her charges with a raised eyebrow, tilt of her head, and the ever-so-subtle change in the tone of her voice, all the time thinking she’s somehow doing this to their benefit. No, her accomplishment was bigger than that creating one of the all-time great cinema villains, right up there with Hannibal Lector, Darth Vader, Goldfinger, the shark from Jaws (1975). It’s no surprise that’s how she’s best remembered, and not simply because she won an Academy Award for her performance as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Milos Forman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s classic paean to free spirits martyred by conformity. People around you change they think you have some special wisdom or magic touch.” Years ago, Louise Fletcher predicted what would head the write-ups of her passing: “When I die, I know that’ll be at the top of my obituary, ‘Louise Fletcher, who won an Oscar for. ![]()
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