Louise Fletcher, who won an Oscar for her role as the sadistic Nurse Ratched in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and gave the culture a portrait of bureaucratic evil so indelible that the character’s last name could carry a TV series 45 years later, died Friday at her home in Montdurausse, France. She was 88 years old.

Her family confirmed her death to Deadline via her agent, David Shaul. Although no cause was given, Shaul stated that she died peacefully in her sleep at the home she created from a 300-year-old farmhouse, surrounded by relatives. “I can’t believe I did something so essential to my well-being,” she said to her family about her beloved home earlier today.

Despite being permanently associated with her most famous character, Fletcher had a successful acting career that spanned more than 60 years and included countless appearances on television and in films. She played Kai Winn Adami, the religious leader of the Bajorans, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In 1996 and 2004, she was nominated for Emmys for guest roles on Picket Fences and Joan of Arcadia.

Fletcher began her acting career in the late 1950s on such episodic TV shows as Lawman, Bat Masterson, Maverick, The Untouchables, and 77 Sunset Strip. She was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, AL, to deaf parents—she used sign language in her Academy Award acceptance speech, one of Oscar’s most memorable moments (watch it below).

Throughout the 1960s, he appeared on Sugarfoot, Perry Mason, and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, among other shows. She made her cinematic debut in 1963’s A Gathering of Eagles and, by chance, in 1974’s Thieves Like Us, directed by Robert Altman. Milo Forman, who was casting his film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a 1962 novel by Ken Kesey set in a mental institution and about a man who pretends to be crazy to get out of jail and a bossy head nurse who wants everyone to do what she says, was impressed by her performance in the latter.

With Jack Nicholson poised to play the rebellious anti-hero patient Randle McMurphy, Forman spent the better part of a year seeking a suitable co-star who could hold her own against the actor, who was riding high on the success of Chinatown at the time. The director reportedly made offers to Colleen Dewhurst, Ellen Burstyn, Anne Bancroft, and Geraldine Page before choosing Fletcher as his despotic Mildred Ratched.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was an instant hit with critics and moviegoers, and Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman won awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Leading Actor, Best Leading Actress, and Best Screenplay.

For a single performance, Fletcher became only the third woman to win the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award. So memorable was her performance that, in 2020, the Ryan Murphy-Evan Romansky Netflix series Ratched—a sort of prequel to the novel and film, starring Sarah Paulson—would only require the single-word title to capture the sense of dread and brutality portrayed by Fletcher decades earlier.

She subsequently recounted that the Oscar win was exciting but ephemeral. She counseled that year’s winners in a 1995 interview with The New York Times to “just enjoy it; it’ll make you incredibly happy for a night.” However, don’t expect it to help your career. ”

“I won the Oscar when I was 41,” Fletcher, then 60, recalled. “It would have been difficult to deal with if I had been 23.” It was difficult to deal with at my age. It was like being thrown a bomb. ”

In the same interview, she recounted Forman’s prescient remark made backstage on Oscar night. “‘Now we’re all going to create flops,’ Milos added. It was correct. The Heretic, the second Exorcist film, was a tremendous flop. Milos performed Ragtime. And Jack performed “The Missouri Breaks]. That is a Czech proverb. ”

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) launched a succession of high-profile but underperforming pictures for Fletcher, including The Cheap Detective (1978), The Lady in Red (1979), Brainstorm (1983), Blue Steel (1990), and Cruel Intentions (1999). In the 1989 TV drama The Karen Carpenter Story, she played the Ratched-like mother of Karen and Richard Carpenter.

A few years later, in 1993, she won a recurring role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the manipulative Bajoran religious leader Kai Winn Adami. In 1996, she appeared in Picket Fences as yet another icy figure, this time as the estranged mother of the local mayor (portrayed by deaf actor Marlee Matlin). Fletcher received an Emmy nomination for her role as a woman who rejected her deaf child.

Fletcher was nominated for another Emmy for her role as an old piano instructor on Joan of Arcadia in 2004.

Subsequent TV performances included 7th Heaven, Private Practice, and, from 2011 to 2012, Shameless, in which she starred as the meth-cooking jailbird mother of William H. Macy’s Frank Gallagher. Her final television appearance was in the 2017 Netflix comedy Girlboss.

From 1959 until their divorce in 1977, Fletcher was married to film producer Jerry Bick. Her sons John and Andrew Bick, granddaughter Emilee Kaya Bick, sister Roberta Ray, brother-in-law Edward Ray, and ten nieces and nephews survive her.