Louise Fletcher, Nurse Ratched, and the Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nests Unforgettable Villain

If you had to list the iconic screen villains of the past century, a few names would immediately come to mind: Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, the Wicked Witch of the West, Norman Bates, the Joker. The characters weve collectively deemed pure evil make up a rogues gallery of serial killers, monsters, and cackling harpies. Any decent roster would have to include Nurse Ratched, of One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest, who manages to be as terrifying (and terrorizing) as the rest, without green skin or a taste for human liver.

But as far as dark hearts—or the totally heartless—go, is she really as bad as all that? Sure, she rules her wards as a petty tyrant, punishing miscreants with electroshock and lobotomies. But from our perspective in the mid-#MeToo, post-Lean In era, you could see her as an overzealous working woman, a frustrated bureaucrat trying to maintain professionalism in the face of one R. P. McMurphy, a rabble-rousing psychiatric patient whos been convicted of assault and statutory rape. (Hes the hero.)

Ken Keseys 1962 novel was already considered a “nonconformists bible,” as Pauline Kael put it in The New Yorker, when Miloš Formans film was released in the fall of 1975, epitomizing a nation at war with itself. At its center are two opposing forces. Jack Nicholsons McMurphy is a scoundrel, a madman, a trickster, a martyr—a symbol of the wild human spirit itching to break free. Nurse Ratched is everything hes not: orderly, rule-bound, the banality of evil in a crisp white cap. Their escalating fight to the finish was the same one that had split America into two incompatible halves: the Establishment and the counterculture.

So nimbly did the movie capture its time—60s liberation doused with 70s vinegar—that it became one of only three films in Oscar history to win the Big Five, for best picture, director, screenplay, actor, and actress. (The other two are It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs.) Barack Obama called it one of his favorite films, alongside Casablanca. While the movie cemented Nicholson as New Hollywoods lovable rogue, something about his antagonist was so frightening, so Freudian, that it lifted her into the realm of icon. “Nurse Ratcheds soft, controlled voice and girlishly antiseptic manner always put you in the wrong; you cant cut through the crap in her—it goes too deep,” Kael wrote. “And shes too smart for you; shes got all the protocol in the world on her side.”

Forty-three years later, shes about to get a second look. Netflix recently won a bidding war for Ratched, an 18-episode series that will trace the characters origin story, produced by Ryan Murphy and starring Sarah Paulson. One can imagine Murphy and Paulson giving her the same redeeming nuance they brought to Marcia Clark in The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. Is Nurse Ratched a feminist anti-heroine waiting to happen? Or is she a monster? If the character still tugs at our curiosity, thats in large part because of Louise Fletcher, the actress who gave Nurse Ratched the humanity she never had on the page—and in the process made her even scarier.

To understand how Fletcher—and Forman, who died this past April—made cinematic history, you have to start in the spring of 1960, with a 24-year-old former college wrestler named Ken Kesey. As a creative-writing student at Stanford, Kesey volunteered as a guinea pig in a government-funded study of the effects of psychoactive drugs such as LSD. Every Tuesday morning at eight, he would show up at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, where a doctor would hand him pills and a shot of juice and keep him under observation. “Patients straggled by in the hall outside, their faces all ghastly confessions,” Kesey wrote later. Sometimes a nurse checked in, looking full of “painful business . . . This was not a person you could allow yourself to be naked in front of.”

Kesey kept detailed accounts of his trips, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with hallucinogenic drugs. Eventually, he and friends like Neal Cassady would form the Merry Pranksters, whose drug-fueled cross-country bus tour in 1964 became the subject of Tom Wolfes The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, immortalizing Kesey as not only a chronicler of the counterculture but one of its most madcap inventors.

Back in 1960, though, the psychedelic revolution had yet to come. Once, while he was working as a night aide at the hospital, a very high Kesey had an epiphany: Were the patients actually crazy, or just eccentrics like him? As his former wife, Faye, said later, “He began to wonder, you know, Whats the difference between the orderlies and the nurse and the patients? And he began to see that they were all damaged in some way or another.” Keseys thinking was in line with that of Michel Foucault, who argued in Madness and Civilization (1961) that insanity was a construct designed to sequester undesirables from society.

The novel that resulted was Keseys indictment of postwar American conformity. Its narrator is Chief Bromden, a Native American patient who pretends to be deaf and mute and believes that the world is run by the “Combine,” a kind of authoritarian conspiracy personified by “the Big Nurse,” described as a giant-breasted harridan with a frozen smile, “big as a damn barn and tough as knife metal.” The men of the ward, meanwhile, are “victims of a matriarchy”—that is, until a charismatic new inmate, McMurphy, riles them to disobedience.

The feminist critique of Keseys novel is long-standing. In Leslie Horsts 1977 essay “Bitches, Twitches, and Eunuchs: Sex-Role Failure and Caricature,” she describes Nurse Ratched as a “perversion of femininity,” an expression of the “fundamental male terror of women who have power.” In 1992, the scholar Elizabeth McMahan argued, “The Big Nurse happens also to be the Big Victim when viewed with an awareness of the social and economic exploitation of women.” Like plenty of midcentury novels, this ones racial undertones also leave something to be desired: in the Chiefs narration, the witless security guards are referred to as the “black boys.” Cast in a certain light, Keseys tale falls into the overlap between 60s psychedelia and mens-rights convention, depicting a world in which white men are enslaved by butch women and their dark-skinned enforcers.

But theres no question that the novel tapped into a rambunctious energy burbling beneath the surface of American life—so much so that it was banned by school districts from Randolph, New York, to Alton, Oklahoma. The book made Kesey an instant literary celebrity, joining a wave of subversive fiction including Catch-22 and A Clockwork Orange. Among its fans was Kirk Douglas, who was fresh off Spartacus when he read a galley and immediately bought the rights. In 1963, he played McMurphy in a Broadway adaptation by Dale Wasserman. The play lasted only two months, but Douglas was determined to star in a movie version.

On a trip to Prague as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. State Department, the actor met Miloš Forman, a leading light of the Czechoslovak New Wave—young, voluble, with a cigar perched perpetually between his lips. Douglas told him he had a novel he wanted him to read; Forman said to send it along. Douglas put a copy in the mail, but it never arrived, apparently confiscated at customs. Each man thought the other had dropped the ball. Nothing happened for 10 years.

In 1973, Forman was living at New Yorks Chelsea Hotel, mid-nervous breakdown, when he got a book in the mail from two producers, Saul Zaentz and Michael Douglas. Unable to get the project off the ground, the elder Douglas had handed the rights off to his 29-year-old son. Forman, who had lost both his parents to Nazi concentration camps and then lived under the Communist regime, instantly connected with the novels anti-authoritarian spirit. “The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched,” he wrote in 2012, “telling me what I could and could not do.”

Ken Kesey, who was living on a blueberry farm in Oregon, had already fallen out with the producers, whom he later sued. (Among his complaints: the filmmakers dropped Chief Bromdens narration, and with it the all-important concept of the Combine.) “Ken Kesey was kind of an enemy of the movie,” recalls the screenwriter Bo Goldman, whom Forman hired to revamp a too-faithful script by Lawrence Hauben. Each morning, the two men would meet by the pool at the Sunset Marquis, bottles of Czech beer at the directors feet, and act out the scenes. When it came to Nurse Ratched, Goldman didnt stray too far from Keseys ball-busting depiction. “I thought about her like my wifes mother,” he says now. “That kind of controlling woman. Control is the operative word. You dont ever think of them romantically or sexually. They use their femininity to control people. And the antipathy towards men.”

Forman didnt think that Kirk Douglas, by then in his mid-50s, was right for McMurphy. “It killed him not to get to play that part,” recalls Michael Douglas (who is executive producer of the new Ratched series). Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman both got the script; both turned it down. Forman was briefly intrigued by the “cheap charisma” of Burt Reynolds. Luckily, Jack Nicholson—whom Forman had just seen in The Last Detail—accepted the role. To cast the patients, Forman scoured both coasts, holding “group therapy” audition sessions. He wound up assembling a dream team of character actors, among them Christopher Lloyd, Brad Dourif, Vincent Schiavelli, and Danny DeVito.

But two roles proved difficult to cast. One was Chief Bromden, for which the filmmakers needed a Native American as big as a tree. They sent scouts around the country and even looked into the Canadian construction business. Finally, a guy Douglas had met on a plane—a used-car salesman from Oregon with a Native American clientele—reported back that hed spotted “the biggest son of a bitch” hed ever seen. It was Will Sampson, a forest ranger from Yakima, Washington, who stood at a commanding six feet seven.

Then there was Nurse Ratched. In his autobiography, Turnaround, Forman wrote, “In the book, she is portrayed as an order-mad, killjoy harpy. At one point Kesey even describes her as having wires coming out of her head, so I searched for a castrating monster.” Forman cycled through star names—Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Page, Angela Lansbury—but one by one they turned him down. “Women, in terms of the womens movement and what was happening at that time, were uncomfortable being the villains,” Douglas says. It was only after a year of searching that a little-known actress who had been begging for the role convinced Forman to take a chance on her. The director thought that her “prim, angelic” manner didnt seem evil at all. But that, of course, was the genius of it.

“Want a cookie?” Louise Fletcher, now 83, asks me over her shoulder. Were in the kitchen of her apartment in Westwood, Los Angeles, where she has lived since the year Cuckoos Nest came out. The décor is more Nice Grandma than Evil Nurse: floral rugs, oil paintings, porcelain figurines. In her office, painted robins-egg blue, her Academy Award sits beneath a lamp. Fletcher makes a pot of tea and opens a tin of shortbread cookies. “My little stash,” she says.

Were speaking only a week after Formans death, and the loss is still raw. “I wept buckets,” Fletcher says, sitting in front of a fireplace. “Hes very alive in me. I can hear his voice. And he could make me laugh like nobody else.” She had not seen Forman since the late 1990s, but, in their Cuckoos Nest days, “I spent quite a lot of time with him. It was about two years. I spent about a year seeing him every few weeks to read for the part.”

In a sense, Fletcher had been preparing to play Nurse Ratched all her life. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, the second child of deaf parents. Her father, an Episcopal missionary, had 42 missions in 11 states; on Sundays, he led services for deaf African-Americans. Having deaf parents, Fletcher explains, is “like having immigrant parents. You feel a special responsibility, and youre a translator. You try to explain the world and how it works to them.” Her mother was a movie-lover, and every weekend at the cinema Fletcher would clarify the plots in sign language. “People used to tease me and say thats how I got started, re-doing old Bette Davis movies.”

Fletcher, who gave Nurse Ratched humanity, made her even scarier in the process.

The young Fletcher would dance and sing for her aunts bridge club, and at 11 she decided to be an actress. She studied theater at the University of North Carolina and in 1957 moved to Los Angeles with two roommates. There, she met her husband, the producer Jerry Bick, and acted in bit parts on TV series like Maverick and Perry Mason. In the early 60s, she gave birth to two sons and decided to give it all up: “I had absolutely no intention of ever going back.”

By 1973, the family was living in London, and Bick was producing movies for Robert Altman. Bick asked his wife to take a role in Altmans Thieves Like Us. “I said, No, Im not doing it—Im not being in my husbands movie,” Fletcher recalls. “Im not having those other actors look at me and say, “I know how you got this movie.” Well, he didnt cast it. He more or less just dared me not to do it.” After a decade, she was back in the game.

Fletchers parents visited the Mississippi set, and Altman watched her translate sign language for her husband. It gave him an idea for a character for a future project, and Fletcher began meeting with the screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury. Fletcher assumed she would play the character they were developing, but months later she was on the phone with Altmans wife, Kathryn, who mentioned that Lily Tomlin had joined the cast. “Whos she going to play?” Fletcher asked. “Oh, my God, Louise, I shouldnt have said anything,” Kathryn replied. Thats how Fletcher found out she wasnt going to star in Nashville.

Out of a job (and furious with Altman), she began pursuing another project: One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest. Forman had seen her in Thieves Like Us—he was thinking of her co-star Shelley Duvall for one of McMurphys floozy girlfriends. Every few weeks, he and Fletcher met at the Sunset Marquis to discuss Nurse Ratched, though she was unaware of the other actresses turning him down. She knew that Keseys version was unplayable, because “shes got smoke coming out of her ears.” But she had a solution.

Her chief insight: Nurse Ratched is convinced shes right. Fletcher had spent much of 1974 consumed with the unfolding Watergate scandal, even writing letters to senators, and saw elements of Nixon in the Big Nurses perversion of power. She thought back to her childhood in Alabama, and the “paternalistic way that people treat other people there.” Moving to California had opened her eyes to how warped things had been back home. “White people actually felt that the life they were creating was good for black people,” she says—a dynamic she recognized in Nurse Ratched and her charges. “Theyre in this ward, shes looking out for them, and they have to act like theyre happy to get this medication or listen to this music. And make her feel good about the way she is.”

Like Fletcher, Forman had lived under an oppressive system. “I slowly started to realize that it will be much more powerful if its not this visible evil,” he said in a 1997 interview. “That shes only an instrument of evil. She doesnt know that shes evil. She, as a matter of fact, believes that shes helping people.” On December 26, 1974, Fletcher got a call from her agent. She was due in Salem, Oregon, on January 3.

Dr. Dean Brooks had read Keseys novel in 1962 and hated it—he thought it totally misrepresented Oregon State Hospital, where he happened to be superintendent. But by the time Michael Douglas came scouting for locations, Brooks had begun to realize that the story was an allegory about “the use and misuse of power.” Also, he figured, if the filmmakers used a soundstage theyd get it all wrong. As a bonus, Forman gave him a part in the movie.

What the director wanted was realism; his mantra was “Is it natural?” Before a frame was shot, the cast spent two weeks in the ward, observing patients and sitting in on group therapy. Each actor got a private cell with a cubby, where he could keep a toothbrush and some personal effects. “I would go up to the maximum-security level on the third floor,” recalls Christopher Lloyd, “and there was a guy, a young guy, a wonderful cartoonist—really talented. He was up there because he killed his girlfriend or something like that.”

“It was rather striking how normal everybody appeared, particularly in maximum security,” says Brad Dourif, who played Billy Bibbit. At one group-therapy session, mixed in among real patients, he noticed something about the head nurse. “I had the feeling that she felt everybody should be more like her, that she was the normal one. I remember saying that to Louise as we walked away, asking if she got the same impression. And she said, Youre really onto something there.”

Before Oregon, Fletcher had met with the celebrity hairdresser Carrie White, who came up with Nurse Ratcheds signature pageboy. Fletcher wanted a hairstyle that looked “stuck in time,” as if she hadnt bothered to change it since World War II. Since the character is never seen outside of work, it was up to Fletcher to fill out her life beyond the hospital grounds. She concocted a detailed backstory—but to this day keeps it a secret. (Ryan Murphy has not been in touch, she says.) This much she will reveal: “She had sacrificed her life for other people. She hasnt married, hadnt done this, hadnt done that, and was self-sufficient on her own leading this life, because she dedicated her life, her earlier life, to other people who needed her.” Also, she decided that Nurse Ratched was a 40-year-old virgin, and was “very turned on by this McMurphy guy.”

Fletcher was confident she had a grip on the character—until her first day of shooting. “We started with the scene where McMurphy first comes in, and I tell him, If you do this, do that, play by the rules, everything will be just fine,” she recalls. “I greet him like you would: kind, soft-spoken. And apparently I tilted my head, as you do. So Miloš came up after the first take and he said, Dont tilt your head. Its weak!”

Suddenly, all she could think about was not tilting her head. That night, she called her husband and told him, “Im going to get fired from this job, you just watch. I cant do it. Im in a vise now and I cant move my head.” Even Nicholson could tell something was off and reassured her: “Oh, he doesnt know what hes talking about.”

The discrepancy, in essence, was how Fletcher and Forman saw Nurse Ratcheds strength. For Fletcher, the key was to make her seem pleasant—delivering her lines so placidly that at one point she asked a sound guy if she was audible. But Forman worried: could a gentle-voiced Nurse Ratched hold her own against Nicholsons off-the-wall McMurphy? “He was scared that that was a weakness, and I was going to look weak and sound weak,” Fletcher says. After a couple of days, Forman realized his error and told her, “I made a mistake.” They went back and re-shot the first scene, Fletchers way.

As the shoot went on, reality and fiction started to blur together. “You began to perceive that the line between being sane and being crazy is thinner than you think,” Dourif says. Sydney Lassick, who played Cheswick, would tap-dance in the hallways. Danny DeVito, who had left his then girlfriend, Rhea Perlman, behind in New York, had an imaginary friend. (“I had somebody with me all the time,” he says now.) Fletcher, meanwhile, found herself gently instructing her castmates at lunch, “Come on, now. Eat up.”

Adding to the madness, there were actual patients assisting with set decoration and props. “We had somebody working in the art department who was an arsonist,” says Douglas. “I said, Is this really a good idea?” Anjelica Huston, Nicholsons girlfriend at the time, visited the set and recalls, “At one point, some grip was opening a window that had a grille behind it, in order to put through some cable, and one of the patients who had a very low-level clearance jumped out the window. They stopped him, but he was pretty intent on throwing himself out three stories.”

For breaks, the cast and crew had a game room where they could play billiards and the video game Pong. At night, theyd go drinking in Salem; Will Sampson, who turned out to be quite the party animal, would return to the motel with multiple waitresses and show up to work the next morning with bloodshot eyes.

Fletcher instinctually knew that she had to distance herself from the camaraderie. “I thought, I cant do this,” she says. “I cant be in this motel and be with these guys. Its too much fun!” But she was scared to broach the subject with the producers. “This is the first time Ive told this story,” she tells me, leaning in. “I never thought theyd give me what I wanted. I didnt have faith that if I went to them and said, Living with these guys is going to kill my performance, so youve got to move me somewhere where I can be on my own—why didnt I trust them to do the right thing, to give me what I wanted? So I said I got threatening phone calls. I made up a story.” (Michael Douglas didnt remember the cover story but said, “I do remember her loneliness, the fact of having to keep one step away.”)

Fletcher had a like-minded co-star in Nicholson, who found canny ways to keep her on her toes. Early on, he asked Fletcher what Nurse Ratcheds first name was. She told him, “Mildred.” Weeks later, in a group-therapy scene, he surprised her with the line, “Im proud to join the group, Mildred.” Fletcher can still see herself blushing in the shot. During another scene, as Nurse Ratched is locking up and leaving for the day, Nicholson yelled off-camera, “What did you accomplish today?” Fletcher had to stifle a laugh.

Still, something inside of Fletcher was itching to let loose, to show the guys she wasnt the virginal killjoy she was playing. She was suffocating, she says, in “this hairdo, this dress, and everything I had on under it that I wore to be the way she was, the white stockings and the undergarments.” One day, she shocked herself—and everyone else on set—by stripping off her nurses uniform to reveal a slip and a bra underneath. “It was, like, Here I am. Im a woman. I am a woman.” As a wrap gift, she gave them all a photo of herself topless, peeking over her naked back, Betty Grable-style, in her nurses cap.

The first time Fletcher saw the movie was in Oakland. On the way home, her agent told her, “Well, its not going to hurt you.” Soon after, at a screening in Chicago, she realized the movie had hit a nerve. During the climactic scene, in which McMurphy strangles Nurse Ratched, audience members stood up and yelled, “Kill her!” It was a sign, perhaps, of the movies fraught gender dynamics but also of its potency. Fletcher was thrilled. When spectators swarmed her after the credits rolled, she says, “That was the first time in my life that I had experienced what fame is.”

Her instinct was right. After being passed on by every studio but United Artists, Cuckoos Nest opened on November 19, 1975, and sailed past the $100 million mark, second only to Jaws at the 1975 box office. The Academy Award nominations came out three months later, and Cuckoos Nest led the field in nine categories, including an unusually strong best-picture race that also included Jaws, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, and Nashville. Fletcher was nominated for best actress, but thankfully she didnt have to compete with Lily Tomlin, who had been nominated for best supporting actress for the role that Fletcher helped create.

On March 29, she arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion looking decidedly un-Ratched-like, in a flowing chiffon dress she had spotted at Bergdorf Goodman. She didnt think she would win—her money was on Glenda Jackson, for Hedda. But when Charles Bronson called her name, she bounded onstage in a whirl of chiffon. “All I can say is Ive loved being hated by you,” she told the Academy. Using sign language, she said to her parents, “You are seeing my dream come true.”

Before Cuckoos Nest, Fletcher had been rejected by 15 agencies, but now the offers were rolling in. For reasons she cant quite recall, she turned down the part of the deranged mother in Carrie, which became a star-making role for Piper Laurie. Soon other roles—Norma Rae among them—slipped out of her grasp. In 1987, playing the evil grandmother in Flowers in the Attic, she realized just how good shed had it with Cuckoos Nest, when the director, Jeffrey Bloom, instructed her: “Scare me to death.” “The director didnt understand about villains,” she says. “Whats so familiar can be the most frightening thing.”

As for Nurse Ratched, Fletcher isnt one for revisionism. “Shes one of the great heavies,” she says proudly, adding, “If you have women like that in authority, you have reason to be afraid.” When I ask if Nurse Ratched has any redeeming qualities, she smiles. “Well, she saw that your teeth were clean.” She sips some tea and continues, “Control is one of the most terrible issues, isnt it? Some people just have to have total control or they cant be in this world.”

During the 2016 presidential race, memes sprouted up online of Hillary Clinton as Nurse Ratched. When I show one to Fletcher, she cackles and says, “Shes got my hair, all right!” Much as Cuckoos Nest encapsulates its era—in which the psychedelic party had soured and the Man was wresting back control—you cant help but see its echoes in our own America gone mad. After all, isnt Donald Trump a kind of McMurphy, fueled by impulse, chaos, and testosterone, able to rally a disaffected populace? Now that were living in McMurphys world, President Ratched doesnt sound much worse. At least our teeth would be clean.

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