Estelle Louise Fletcher, known professionally as Louise Fletcher, is an American actress. Fletcher had her acting debut in the television series77 Sunset Strip in the 1957/58 season. She guest starred in the television series Wagon Train in 1959 before making her film debut in A Gathering of Eagles in 1963. In 1974, after a decade-long hiatus from acting in which she raised a family, Fletcher appeared in Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us. The following year, Fletcher gained international recognition for her performance as Nurse Ratched in the drama film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. She became only the third actress to ever win an Academy Award, BAFTA Award and Golden Globe Award for a single performance, after Audrey Hepburn and Liza Minnelli. Other notable film roles include ', Brainstorm, Firestarter, Flowers in the Attic, 2 Days in the Valley, and Cruel Intentions. Later in her career, Fletcher returned to television, appearing as Winn Adami in ', as well as receiving Primetime Emmy Award nominations for her guest-starring roles in the television series Picket Fences and Joan of Arcadia. In 2011–2012, she appeared in a recurring role on the Showtime television series Shameless as Frank Gallagher's foul-mouthed and hard-living mother who is serving a prison sentence for manslaughter. More recently, she portrayed the recurring role of Rosie on the Netflix series Girlboss.
Early life
Fletcher was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the second of four children of Estelle Caldwell and the Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopal missionary from Arab, Alabama. Both of her parents were deaf and worked with the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Fletcher's father founded more than forty churches for the deaf in Alabama. Fletcher and her siblings, Roberta, John and Georgianna, were all born without any hearing loss so 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 received acting lessons by night.
Career
Fletcher began appearing in several television series including Lawman and Maverick.. Also in 1959, she appeared in the second episode of the original Untouchables TV series,, "Ma Barker and Her Boys" as Elouise. Fletcher recalled having greater success being cast in Westerns due to her height: "I was tall, and no television producer thought a tall woman could be sexually attractive to anybody. I was able to get jobs on westerns because the actors were even taller than I was." In 1960, Fletcher made two guest appearances on Perry Mason, both times as defendant Gladys Doyle in "The Case of the Mythical Monkeys," and Susan Connolly in "The Case of the Larcenous Lady." In the summer of 1960, she was cast as Roberta McConnell in the episode "The Bounty Hunter" of NBC's western television series Tate, starring David McLean. In 1974, she returned to film in Thieves Like Us, co-produced by her husband and Robert Altman, who also directed. When the two had a falling out on Altman's next project,, Altman decided to cast Lily Tomlin for the role of Linnea Reese, initially created for and by Fletcher. Meanwhile, director Miloš Forman saw Fletcher in Thieves and consequently cast her as McMurphy's nemesis Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Fletcher gained international recognition and fame for the role, winning Academy Award for Best Actress, as well as a BAFTA Award and Golden Globe. When Fletcher accepted her Oscar, she used sign language to thank her parents. After Cuckoo's Nest, Fletcher had mixed success in film. She made several financially and critically successful films, while others were box office failures. Fletcher's film roles were in such features as ', The Cheap Detective, The Lady in Red, The Magician of Lublin, Brainstorm, Firestarter, Invaders From Mars, Flowers in the Attic, Two Moon Junction, Best of the Best, Blue Steel, Virtuosity, High School High, and Cruel Intentions. Additionally, she played the character Ruth Shorter, a supporting role, in Aurora Borealis, alongside Joshua Jackson and Donald Sutherland, and appeared in the Fox Faith film The Last Sin Eater. Fletcher co-starred in such made-for-TV movies as The Karen Carpenter Story , Nightmare on the 13th Floor, The Haunting of Seacliff Inn, and The Stepford Husbands. From 1993 to 1999, she held a recurring role in ' as the scheming Bajoran religious leader Kai Winn Adami. She also earned Emmy Award nominations for her guest roles on the Tom Skerritt's CBS television series, Picket Fences, and later on Joan of Arcadia. In 2009, Fletcher appeared in the NBC series Heroes as the physician mother of character Emma Coolidge. In 2011, she appeared in the Showtime series Shameless as Grammy Gallagher, Frank Gallagher's foul-mouthed and hard-living mother who is serving a prison sentence for manslaughter related to a meth lab explosion.
Personal life
Fletcher married literary agent and producer Jerry Bick in 1960, divorcing in 1977. The couple had two sons, John Dashiell Bick and Andrew Wilson Bick: Fletcher took an 11-year hiatus from acting to raise them. Fletcher received an honorary degree from Gallaudet University in 1982. In 1998 Fletcher was charged with reckless driving after she drove her car into a police officer.
