R.I.P. Louise Fletcher

There’s only one tribute to actress Louise Fletcher you need to read and that is my friend Dan Callahan’s over at Ebert. So many revelatory details, particularly from the Vanity Fair interview with Fletcher in 2018. (She thinks Nurse Ratched was a virgin, and that she was turned on by McMurphy.) I love the stories about how Jack Nicholson constantly goofing off, etc., trying to make Fletcher break character. Exhibit A:

Then there was the one notorious day, when Fletcher finally needed a break from playing this inhuman woman, and stripped to the waist to pose like Bettie-Page to the hooting appreciation of the cast and crew. Lol. You can’t be Nurse Ratched 24/7.

But back to the matter at hand. Here’s Dan:

In our final glimpse of Nurse Ratched, after McMurphy has been lobotomized, she wears a neck brace, and her manner is very soft, very “kind.” But we know what she is underneath. Fletcher has shown us. Anyone who has had to deal with bureaucracies knows that there are Nurse Ratcheds, both male and female, in every one of them, and their voices are “friendly” as they twist their knives. There is no other performance by any actor that shows this type of person in such a substantial and revelatory way.

But there’s more: the way Forman was at first resistant to casting her, and then – after he did cast her – being uncertain about some of her choices. But Fletcher showed him, calmly, that her way was the right way. She didn’t have a “take” on Nurse Ratched. She had INSIGHT into this woman. (I made this point about De Niro and Jake La Motta in my Raging Bull video essay.)

On the first day of shooting, he told Fletcher not to tilt her head because it would read as weak, but Fletcher wanted to emphasize the soft and placating attitude this woman puts on for her inmates, and Forman eventually saw that she was right and re-shot this scene her way.

Please go read the whole thing. Pieces like this are why we need writers like Dan. Keepers of the flame, torch-bearers, those who can express the things we want to say, or … help us understand why something was important, why it’s important to take a moment when someone passes from this earth, and pay tribute to their contribution.

And Dan’s right. Her Oscar acceptance speech is one of the most touching in the entire history of the Oscars.