You won't find Louise Fletcher complaining about roles for women. This hard-working actress began in TV in the late 1950s and early 60s but had been away from the business for more than a decade raising her two sons when her friendship with Robert Altman led to her feature debut in the director's "Thieves Like Us" (1974). Though she lost the part modeled on herself to Lily Tomlin in Altman's "Nashville" (1975), she scored her greatest success that year, winning the Best Actress Oscar as the cold, dictatorial Nurse Ratched in Milos Forman's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Fletcher's rather abrupt fame dissipated following the critical and box office failures "Exorcist II: The Heretic" (1977) and "The Cheap Detective" (1978), and nothing could change the fact that she was already middle-aged in a youth-obsessed Hollywood when the Academy had smiled on her. Many actresses had passed on the role of Ratched, refusing to play a part so utterly lacking in sympathy, but for Fletcher, it was her ticket to a prolific career, one in which she would often portray equally unsympathetic characters.

Questionable choices regarding material further distanced Fletcher from her finest hour. Through the 80s, she made a series of odd international (i.e., "Mamma Dracula" 1980) and independently produced films (e.g., the campy "Two Moon Junction" 1988), sometimes of poor quality and often little seen. Perhaps her finest moment post-"Cuckoo's Nest" came as the chain-smoking scientist of "Brainstrom" (1983), but that film disappeared quickly in the wake of star Natalie Wood's tragic death. Mired in supporting roles (a grandmother before her time), she shouldered on into the 90s, making up with Altman and appearing as herself in "The Player" (1992). The steadily working character actress played Fairuza Balk's chronically-depressed mother in "Tollbooth" (1994), crime czar Elizabeth Deane in the futuristic "Virtuosity" (1995), a pair of educators that made Nurse Ratched look like a camp counselor in "High School High" and "Frankenstein and Me" (both 1996), and Sarah Michelle Gellar's aunt in "Cruel Intentions" (1999).

Much of Fletcher's frequent TV work (she made four TV-movies in 1997 alone) has been standard pabulum, but she has graced the interesting likes of the darkly hued "Last Waltz on a Tightrope" (PBS, 1986); the story of transsexual Renee Richards, "Second Serve" (CBS, 1986); and the biopic "J. Edgar Hoover" (Showtime, 1987). She turned in an appropriately unflattering portrait of mother Agnes Carpenter in "The Karen Carpenter Story" (CBS, 1989), battled for the custody of her murderer son's child in the CBS miniseries "In a Child's Name" (1991) and appeared as Kirsten Dunst's beloved Aunt Eva in the absorbing Showtime Holocaust drama "The Devil's Arithmetic" (1999). Though both her attempts as a series regular, "The Boys of Twilight" (CBS, 1992) and "VR.5" (Fox, 1995), fizzled, she has over the years brought her compelling professional seasoning, her penchant for playing older than her years, and her talent for portraying cool, detached and sometimes sinister characters to guest spots on series such as "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" (UPN), "Picket Fences" (CBS) and "Profiler" (NBC), among others.