13. Nurse Ratched

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

The coldest of hearts, the sternest of looks, the reddest of tapes. Nurse Mildred Ratched is more than merely the head of administration at a psychiatric hospital. In Louise Fletcher’s Oscar-winning turn, she rules the ward with a quietly terrifying iron fist, serving passive-aggressive put-downs to break the spirits of the mentally ill, efficiently and effectively. It’s little wonder that über-producer Ryan Murphy last year looked beyond Jack Nicholson’s protagonist McMurphy in granting Ratched her own spin-off Netflix origin series. As McMurphy himself puts it: “She’s somethin’ of a cunt, ain’t she, Doc?”

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