A resolute housewife who, in addition to her own family, cooks and takes care of three bank robbers, that was the role that became groundbreaking for Louise Fletcher.
She played Mattie in Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us (1974) and made the supporting character in a Southern crime thriller so incisive that she caught the eye of Miloš Forman, who was preparing the film adaptation of a successful novel by Ken Kesey and for the psychiatric drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest needed someone for Nurse Ratched, a ward master who stands with an iron hand and a fierce gaze against a group of troubled and agitated patients.
Louise Fletcher turned out to be a brilliant choice also because she didn't seek the slightest compromise:
In a markedly anti-authoritarian era, Mildred Ratched could not hope for any sympathy from the public.
She even addressed that specifically when she was finally awarded an Oscar: "I think you all hated me."
Fletcher, born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1934, came to Hollywood in the late 1950s, where she first appeared mainly in television series.
She married producer Jerry Bick, with whom she had two children, for whom she gave up further work in the film business for a decade after 1963.
Bick went on to be the producer of Thieves Like Us and was a major contributor to his wife's breakthrough;
however, the marriage ended in divorce in 1977.
Louise Fletcher dryly commented on the gigantic success of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest": "From now on we're all going to make terrible flops." Example in the series "Joan of Arcadia").
Nevertheless, what remains of her is basically this one role of Nurse Ratched.