Every actor who turned down an Oscar-winning role in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’
With the benefit of hindsight, only a foolish actor would turn down a role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, seeing as Miloš Forman’s literary adaptation is rightly lauded as one of the greatest movies ever made.
It also became only the second film in Academy Awards history to hoover up the ‘Big Five’ after claiming the prizes for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Actress’, and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, which, curiously, were the only Oscars it won from nine nominations in total, although the cast and crew would have bitted your hand off for that quintet before a single winner had been announced on stage.
Jack Nicholson was in incendiary form as Randall P McMurphy, in a performance that comfortably ranks as one of the greatest that American cinema has ever seen, and he’s matched every step of the way by Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched, and their dynamic was informed by a secret approach to their respective characters that only the two stars were aware of when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was shooting.
Most folks familiar with the movie will know that Kirk Douglas coveted the leading role, having previously played it on Broadway, only for a fracture to form in his family when his son, Michael, ruled him out of the running because he’d aged out of the part. The latter won an Oscar for his role as producer, but it took a while for his relationship with his old man to recover.
The Spartacus figurehead wanted to headline the ensemble but wasn’t offered the gig, and several other actors were asked to play McMurphy and Ratched, who turned their noses up at the opportunity, which must have left them feeling mighty stupid when Nicholson and Fletcher collected their trophies, regardless of how difficult it is to imagine anyone else occupying either berth.
“You know, Gene Hackman passed on it,” the younger Douglas told Entertainment Weekly. “Marlon Brando passed on it. Miloš had a wacky idea about Burt Reynolds for a while. ‘Burt Reynolds has cheap charisma!’, he used to say. But once Hal [Ashby] showed us a couple of scenes from The Last Detail, we knew.”
James Caan was also on the list of actors who passed on McMurphy, opening the door for Nicholson to deliver a tour de force that won him the first of his three Oscars. Finding the perfect person to play Nurse Ratched was hardly a walk in the park, either, especially with the circumstances surrounding Fletcher’s eventual hiring.
“Every actress, every name actress, turns the part down, because in 1973/74, under the Women’s Liberation Movement, it was not cool to play a villain. It wasn’t cool to play a bitch,” Douglas explained. “So Geraldine Page and Anne Bancroft, five actresses, turned the part down. Louise Fletcher had a small part in a Robert Altman picture [Thieves Like Us] and did a test for us. She was perfect, but she had that little voice, too. You know, she had a little voice, but those steely blue eyes, which Ken Kesey talked about in the book. She was a lovely lady and came out of nowhere.”
Lily Tomlin had already been cast as Ratched, whereas Fletcher was preparing to reunite with Altman on Nashville. Ultimately, the two ended up switching places, with the eventual ‘Best Actress’ winner not being officially cast as McMurphy’s principal antagonist until a week before the start of rehearsals, not that her lack of preparation was obvious, and it’s fair to say everything worked out as it was supposed to.
Every actor who turned down an Oscar-winning ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ role:
- Gene Hackman
- Marlon Brando
- Burt Reynolds
- James Caan
- Geraldine Page
- Anne Bancroft
- Lily Tomlin
