Louise Fletcher

Estelle Louise Fletcher is an Academy Awardwinning, American film and television actress. She initially debuted in the television series Maverick in 1959 before being cast in Robert Altmans Thieves Like Us . The following year, Fletcher gained international recognition for her performance as Nurse Ratched in the 1975 film One Flew over the Cuckoos 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 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 Exorcist II The Heretic , Brainstorm , Firestarter , Flowers in the Attic ,Days in the Valley , and Cruel Intentions .

Fletcher was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the second of four children to 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 hardofhearing. Fletchers father founded more thanchurches for the deaf in Alabama. Fletcher and her siblings, Roberta, John and Georgianna, were all born without any hearing loss 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.

Source: Wikipedia