A Great Movie Villain (OT)

Saul Zaentz [producer], Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher and Michael Douglas [producer] posing with their Oscars at the 1976 Academy Awards on March 30, 1976. [Photo and caption courtesy Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at the UCLA Library.]

Anne Bancroft turned the role down. So did Ellen Burstyn, famous from movies like The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. So did Angela Lansbury. None of them wanted audiences to see them on screen embodying someone so evil. The role went instead to Louise Fletcher, a talented actress who had put a promising early career on hold for more than a decade to raise her sons. Some people are born to play a part, and Louise Fletcher at 40 was perfect for the role of Mildred Ratched, the dreaded "Nurse Ratched" in Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey's novel—the self-controlled, rigidly controlling, and ultimately monstrous driver of the plot's action. When she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, she thanked the audience for hating her. And thanked her parents, who were both deaf, in sign language.

Nurse Ratched might actually be the greatest female movie villain, if you count only naturalistic portrayals of plausibly real people. Fletcher's Mildred, as written by Ken Kesey and screenwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, is wholly believable, a fully rounded character. True, Nurse Ratched did once come in only second on a list of the greatest female movie villains—but she lost to the Wicked Witch of the West.

Louise Fletcher in a still from One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest and in later life

One of the great fundamental human dramas that affects us all is also the subject of Sigmund Freud's best book—the never-ending tension between the freewheeling id of individual impulses and the degree to which we must all conform to society's requirements of orderliness and rule-following in order to get along and get by. Cuckoo's Nest the movie is the best work of art on that theme ever put on celluloid. At least as far as I've seen. Even Fletcher herself said, "I envied the other actors tremendously. They were so free, and I had to be so controlled."

The film was Jack Nicholson's breakout role—his arrival, at least, as the familiar, inimitable, first-name-only perennial A-lister of top actors and celebrity personalities. Many of the supporting players went on to fame and accomplishment later in their careers. The movie was one of only three—one from the '30s, one from the '70s, and one from the '90s—to win all five major categories at the Oscars. I'm not much of a movie reviewer, but man, do I have opinions about that one. We could really get into it.

I watched the movie for the third time just the other night. I've been catching up on movie watching since I discovered all the free movies on YouTube Premium, watching many I missed when they came out alongside a few old favorites. This one gets better with age. Truly a masterpiece. As with A Beautiful Mind, which I'm watching for the first time now, the book is also excellent. (There are a lot of books I've read that were made into movies I never saw.) I particularly like tragicomedies, because life is a tragicomedy.

Louise Fletcher died on September 23, 2022, of natural causes, with her family near, at her home in Southern France. She was 88. She had many other accomplishments, not all of them professional, although Mildred Ratched overshadowed the rest of her career in one way or another. Her first credits date from 1958, and she worked until 2020. Director Forman discovered her from her role as Mattie in Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us. If a career can have only one peak, though, what a soaring, frosty peak Louise Fletcher gave us at her best. R.I.P.

Mike

CORRECTION: Well, I'll be damned...this site needs a better Editor. I watch two videos last night, both saying she had just died, as if it were news, and I wrote this post this morning as if her death were recent without ever questioning it...or noticing. Joseph Reid caught my error. (Thanks, Joseph.) Very sorry to be spreading misinformation! I'll leave the post up anyway, corrected. Sorry for getting it wrong at first. —Mike, Yr. Fallible Ed.

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Featured Comments from:

John Holland: "Yes, RIP Louise. An amazing talent in a difficult role. She seemed to live a long full life. Ave atque vale as they say. [A Latin phrase meaning 'hail and farewell' or 'I salute you, and goodbye.' —Ed.] A friend of mine once wrote a comment to some long-gone blog post about this movie, explaining why Nurse Ratched was her hero. Not a popular take to be sure, and I don't remember the exact wording, but her argument was based on the fact that she had a Randall McMurphy in her own family: a volatile narcissist, a destructive sociopath who was charming in a manipulative way, but swept an F5 tornado of obliteration through every life he touched. And then smiled and sweet-talked his way into the next disaster. To her, the planet breathed a sigh of relief when Nurse Ratched ordered McMurphy's pre-frontal lobotomy. Now, Ratched was still a flawed, nasty piece of work, but by my friend's reckoning McMurphy was probably far worse. Ratched had the thankless job of being the white blood cell in society's immune system. Something to think about, anyway."

Mike replies: That's an interpretation I had never even thought about. I guess that's one of the amazing things about works of fiction: they can be interpreted in many ways, including ways that the author or authors don't necessarily intend.

Comments

[Sean]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has aged well, and Louise Fletcher's Oscar remains a win worth celebrating. One unfortunate consequence of the film was the fear of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) reinforced in viewers' minds. ECT has proved an effective treatment for countless sufferers of severe depression. But it didn't help my Mother. I can't recall how many sessions she had or the exact number of times she went into a Psychiatric Hospital; What I do remember is my teenage self thinking any deterioration in her was caused by ECT—largely because of that movie.

The film is a piece of art, not a documentary; I can appreciate it today as a masterpiece.

Sean

[Joseph Reid]

Did she not die in 2022?

[Aaagh, jeez, I'm losin' it. Correction posted. Many thanks, Joseph. The Fact-Checker has been fired. --Mike]

[Mike]

She also played one of the best Star Trek villains ever, Kai Winn in Star Trek Deek Space 9. A similar character that you love to hate.

[DB]

She was also great in The Cheap Detective.

[Stan B.]

Yup, always saw each as two very different sides of the same exact coin, neither knew when to chill or bend in the slightest, they could only go in one direction at one speed. One indulged, the other repressed; Mr. Ying/Ms. Yang.

[Jez Cunningham]

Could we have captions to the photos please?

[Craig Yuill]

It is interesting that Angela Lansbury was approached to play the role of Nurse Ratched. She played one of the nastiest female villains in film history IMO — the ultra-manipulative Soviet mole Eleanor Iselin, in the original 1962 movie version of “The Manchurian Candidate”. A far cry from her Jessica Fletcher character in the “Murder She Wrote” TV show. Perhaps she turned down Nurse Ratched because she was concerned about being typecast.

[John Bauscher]

My brother and I attended an event featuring Ken Kesey 40+ years ago at Centre College in Danville KY. He said that he had no interest in the production of Cukoo’s Nest because Nicholson was not believable as McMurphy because he was too small for a person that was challenged to fight because he was big and faced repeated attacks from people trying to prove themselves. He did say they (the merry pranksters) visited the set when they hired Scatman Caruthers because Scatman really knew how to party. I remember Kesey saying ‘Have you seen Jack Nicholson?’ Then held out his hand waist high and did a flick motion like he was swatting a bug. Kesey himself was pretty big, wrestled heavyweight in high school.

[Thanks John. Very interesting!

Kesey by Karsh:

https://karsh.org/ken-kesey/

I'd just comment that nowhere in the movie does McMurphy need to be big, and in one place he needs to be on the smaller side--when he wants to rip up the water fountain and can't.

I wonder, how many authors are completely happy with the famous movies made from their books? It reminds me of when Robert Frost was asked what one of his poems meant. He said, "What, you want me to say it worse?" --Mike]