Oscar-winning actor Louise Fletcher dies at 88

Louise Fletcher, who won the best actress Oscar for her unforgettable performance as Nurse Ratched in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, died Friday at her home in France, according to a representative. She was 88 years old.

Based on Ken Kesey’s novel and examining the repressive propensity of authority through the story of the patients and employees of a psychiatric ward, the classic film won five Oscars in 1976, which include the best picture and best actor for Jack Nicholson.

Also read: What is the Global Citizen Festival?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the first film in over four decades to win the best picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay. It was nominated for four more Oscars and was a huge box office success.

Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched was declared the fifth-greatest villain in film history — and the second-greatest villainess, trailing only the Wicked Witch of the West — in the American Film Institute TV special AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Heroes & Villains.

Also read: Taylor Swift’s Midnights: All you need to know

Oddly, the script softened the Ratched character compared to Kesey’s initial, and Fletcher gave a rather nuanced performance, often expressing the character’s emotions merely through facial gestures, which is why she merited her Oscar in the first place. Indeed, the actor makes us feel sorry for Ratched at several key points in the film.

In a 2003 re-evaluation of Cuckoo’s Nest, Roger Ebert stated that, despite receiving an Oscar, Fletcher’s performance “is not enough appreciated. This may be because her Nurse Ratched is so thoroughly contemptible, and because she embodies so completely the qualities we all (men and women) have been taught to fear in a certain kind of female authority figure — a woman who has subsumed sexuality and humanity into duty and righteousness.”

Also read: Constance Wu says she faced sexual harassment on Fresh Off the Boat sets

She was most recently seen in Liev Schreiber and Jeanne Tripplehorn’s 2013 film A Perfect Man.

On Showtime’s Shameless, Fletcher portrayed family matriarch Peggy Grammy Gallagher, a crafty ex-con who still desired a relationship with her grandchildren. From 1993 to 1999, she appeared on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the scheming, duplicitous spiritual leader Winn Adami, on the cult sci-fi film VR.5 from 1995 to 1997, and on ER in 2005.

She received Emmy nominations for her guest appearances on Picket Fences in 1996 and Joan of Arcadia in 2004.