Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which premiered on November 19, 1975, won critical acclaim, box office success, and a shelf full of Oscars.

Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas was dead set on adapting the story for the screen. Douglas contacted Czech director Forman about the project, promising to send Forman a copy of the book for his perusal.

Douglas mailed Forman the novel, but the package was confiscated by Czechoslovakian customs and never reached the director.

Unaware of the parcel’s fate, the filmmaker resented Douglas’s broken promise, and Douglas thought Forman rude for never bothering to confirm receipt of the novel. It took a decade to sort the mess out, and things were only cleared up once Kirk’s son, actor/producer Michael Douglas, took another crack at production and contacted Forman once more.

Louise Fletcher was so upset with the fact that the other cast members of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) could laugh and be happy, while she had to be so cold and heartless, that near the end of production, she removed her dress and stood in only her panties to prove to the cast members she was not “a cold-hearted monster”.

Forman’s original view of Nurse Ratched was as “the personification of evil,” a characterization that made Fletcher a bad fit for the part in the filmmaker’s mind. As Fletcher pressed for the role, Forman’s perspective of Ratched evolved: “I slowly started to realize that it would be much more powerful if it’s not this visible evil,” he said. “That she’s only an instrument of evil. She doesn’t know that she’s evil. She, as a matter of fact, believes that she’s helping people.” This new take on the character paved the way for the official casting of Fletcher.

Fletcher was so disturbed by her own performance that she couldn’t watch the film for years.

In later interviews, she said that she found ways to make her character human, yet remain unsympathetic, ultimately deciding that Nurse Ratched actually did care about the patients, and felt she was doing what was best for them, but was ultimately misguided and drunk on her own power.

Director Milos Forman relied heavily on reaction shots to pull more characters into scenes. In some group therapy scenes, there were ten minutes of Jack Nicholson’s reactions filmed, even if he had very little dialogue.

The shot of Fletcher looking icily at Nicholson after he returns from shock therapy was actually her irritated reaction to a piece of direction from Forman.

Fletcher was signed a week before filming began, after auditioning repeatedly for over six months. Forman had told her each time that she just wasn’t approaching the part correctly, but kept calling her back.

She only realized that the part of Nurse Ratched was a hotly contested role among all the leading actresses of the day when a reporter visiting the set happened to casually mention it.

Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, Colleen Dewhurst, Jane Fonda, Audrey Hepburn, Angela Lansbury, Jeanne Moreau, Shirley MacLaine, and Geraldine Page were all considered for the role.

All of the actors who played patients actually lived on the Oregon State Hospital psychiatric ward throughout production. The men personalized their sleeping quarters, spent their days on campus “get[ting] a sense of what it was to be hospitalized” (as actor Vincent Schiavelli put it), and interacting with real psychiatric patients.

Not since 1934’s It Happened One Night swept the Oscars had a film walked away with awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest took home the lot, with Nicholson and Fletcher winning the top acting awards. The feat would not be matched again for another 16 years, with The Silence of the Lambs becoming the next (and last) movie to earn the distinction.

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