I HATED YOU!

Back in the day when I did such things, I went to a play called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. 

From Wikipedia: "The play revolves around a dysfunctional family consisting of single mother Beatrice and her two daughters, Ruth and Tillie, who try to cope with their abysmal status in life. Shy Matilda Hunsdorfer, nicknamed Tillie, prepares an experiment involving marigolds raised from seeds exposed to radioactivity for her science fair. She is, however, constantly thwarted by her mother Beatrice, who is self-centered and abusive, and by her extroverted and unstable sister Ruth, who submits to her mother's will. Over the course of the play, Beatrice constantly tries to stamp out any opportunities Tillie has of succeeding, due to her own lack of success in life. As the play progresses, the paths of the three characters diverge: Tillie wins the science fair through perseverance; Ruth attempts to stand up to her mother but has a nervous collapse at the end of the play, and Beatrice—driven to the verge of insanity by her deep-seated enmity towards everyone—kills the girls' pet rabbit Peter and ends up wallowing in her own perceived insignificance. Despite this, Tillie (who is much like her project's deformed but beautiful and hardy marigolds) secretly continues to believe that everyone is valuable."

Anyhow, the mother Beatrice was played perfectly - she was a horrible person! After the play, the cast showed up in the lobby for a meet-and-greet. When I saw the actress who played the mother, I walked up to her, took her hand, looked her in the eye and said, "I hated you!"

She smiled, clasped my hand more firmly, and replied, "That was the best compliment you could have given me."

I mention this because I just came across an interview with actress Louise Fletcher. I hated her too (at least the part she played - Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (If you haven't seen the movie, it's one of the best ever, having won the 'big five' Oscars and dozens of others! See it!)

Besides having read the book and seeing the movie several times, I also saw a couple of stage play productions as well. They were somewhat different from the movie, but each great in their own way (the difference in the interpretation and presentation of Randle Patrick McMurphy ("R. P.") still worked.

By the way, I hated the character of Nurse Ratched and still do!