Louise Fletcher death: Age, family, and net worth

Louise Fletcher, the Alabama actor who won an Academy Award for her performance as the cold-hearted Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, one of the most maligned characters in film history, has died. She was 88 years old.

Fletcher died of natural causes on Friday at her home in Montdurausse, France, according to her son Andrew Bick. She’d beaten breast cancer twice before.

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Fletcher, the daughter of deaf parents, gave one of the most moving Oscar acceptance speeches in history. She also starred as a psychiatrist in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and alongside Peter Falk in The Cheap Detective (1978).

On television, she played religious leader Kai Winn Adami on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and earned Emmy nominations for her guest appearances on Picket Fences and Joan of Arcadia in 1996 and 2004, respectively.

She most recently appeared on Shameless as William H. Macy’s meth-dealing mother, as well as in the Liev Schreiber film A Perfect Man (2013) and the Netflix series Girlboss, featuring Britt Robertson.

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In 1960, Fletcher married publishing agent and producer Jerry Bick, whom she divorced in 1977. John Dashiell Bick and Andrew Wilson Bick are the couple’s two sons. Fletcher took an 11-year hiatus from acting to raise her children.

In 1982, Fletcher was awarded an honorary degree from Gallaudet University.

Fletcher was charged with reckless driving in 1998 after allegedly colliding with a police officer who was attempting to remove a deer carcass from a motorway. The officer was wounded in both legs and was taken to the hospital.

As per celebritynetworth.com, Fletcher’s net worth was $1 million.

Fletcher decided to return to Hollywood after more than a decade away to raise her two sons, appearing in the Robert Altman film Thieves Like Us (1974) alongside Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall.

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Director Milos Forman noticed her first in this film before he cast her in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 book concerning life in an Oregon psychiatric hospital.

“He 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,” Fletcher explained in a 2016 interview. “He said, ‘Who is that?'”

Once Anne Bancroft, Angela Lansbury, Geraldine Page, Colleen Dewhurst, and Ellen Burstyn all turned down the role of Nurse Ratched — many trusting the character was too impossible to play — Forman eventually cast Fletcher.