Estelle Louise Fletcher (July 22, 1934 - September 23, 2022) was an American actress who portrayed the antagonist Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress, a BAFTA Award, and a Golden Globe Award. She also had a recurring role as the Bajoran religious leader Kai Winn Adami in the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99), as well as the role of Sebastian's aunt Helen Rosemond in the movie Cruel Intentions (1999). She was nominated for two Emmy Awards for her roles in the television series Picket Fences (1996) and Joan of Arcadia (2004). Her final role was as Rosie in the Netflix series Girlboss (2017).
Early life[edit]
Estelle Louise Fletcher was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama,[1] the second of four children of Estelle (née Caldwell)[2] and the Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopalian missionary from Arab, Alabama. Both her parents were deaf and worked with the deaf and hard-of-hearing.[3][4]
Fletcher's father founded more than 40 churches for the deaf in Alabama.[5] Fletcher and her siblings, Roberta, John,[6] and Georgianna,[5] were all born without any hearing loss,[7] so she was taught to speak by a hearing aunt.[3] She received a bachelor's degree in drama from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1957.[8]
Career[edit]
Fletcher began appearing in several television series including Lawman (1958) and Maverick (1959). (The Maverick episode "The Saga of Waco Williams" with James Garner was the series's highest-rated episode.)[9] Also in 1959, she appeared in an episode of the original Untouchables TV series starring Robert Stack, "Ma Barker and Her Boys", as Elouise.[10] Fletcher recalled having greater success being cast in Westerns due to her height:
I was 5 feet 10 inches [1.78 m] tall, and no television producer thought a tall woman could be sexually attractive to anybody. I was able to get jobs on westerns because the actors were even taller than I was.
- Louise Fletcher (November 1975)[3]
In 1960, Fletcher made two guest appearances on Perry Mason, as defendant Gladys Doyle in "The Case of the Mythical Monkeys", and as Susan Connolly in "The Case of the Larcenous Lady". In the summer of 1960, she was cast as Roberta McConnell in the episode "The Bounty Hunter" of Tate, starring David McLean.[11]