Louise Fletcher

About Louise Fletcher

Louise Fletcher (born July 22, 1934) is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning American actress.

Fletcher, the second of four children, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of Estelle Caldwell and Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher, who was an Episcopalian minister from Arab, Alabama. Both of her parents were deaf and worked with the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Fletcher's father founded more than 40 churches for the deaf in Alabama. Fletcher and her siblings, Roberta, John and Georgianna, were all born hearing without any hearing loss; she was taught to speak by a hearing aunt, who also introduced her to acting. After attending the University of North Carolina, she traveled to Los Angeles, California, where she found work as a secretary by day and took acting lessons by night.

Fletcher began appearing in several television productions, including the highest-rated episode of Maverick. She married Jerry Bick and took time off to raise her two children; she eventually divorced Bick, who died in 2004. In 1974, she returned to film in Thieves Like Us. Miloš Forman saw her, and cast her (possibly because of her height and bearing) as McMurphy's nemesis Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. When Fletcher accepted her Oscar, she used sign language to thank her parents, having spent two hours on the phone with her sister the previous night brushing up on her signing skills.