Louise Fletcher is an American actress best known for her role as Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and as Kai Winn Adami in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She also guest starred on the science fiction television series Heroes. She also received Emmy nominations for her guest starring roles in Picket Fences and Joan of Arcadia. Fletcher, the second of four children, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of Estelle Caldwell and the Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher, who was an Episcopal priest from Arab, Alabama. Both of... her parents were deaf and worked with the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Fletcher's father founded more than 40 churches 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 took acting lessons by night.
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