Louise Fletcher

Estelle Louise Fletcher (July 22, 1934 - September 23, 2022) was an American actress. She is best known for her portrayal of the antagonist Nurse Ratched in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which earned her numerous accolades, including the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. Fletcher had a recurring role as the Bajoran religious leader Kai Winn Adami in the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999). 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). Estelle Louise Fletcher was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama, the second of four children of Estelle (née Caldwell) and the Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopal missionary from Arab, Alabama. Her parents were deaf and worked with the deaf/hard-of-hearing, but Fletcher and her siblings, Roberta, John, and Georgianna, were all of normal hearing, so the children were sent in turns to live with Estelle's hearing sister in Texas for three months at a time to ensure they learned spoken English. Fletcher's father founded more than 40 churches for the deaf in Alabama. She received a bachelor's degree in drama from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1957. 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.) Also in 1959, she appeared in an episode of the original Untouchables television series starring Robert Stack, "Ma Barker and Her Boys", as Elouise. Fletcher recalled having greater success being cast in Westerns due to her height: