Kathy Bates is a film and stage actress best known for Misery, Dolores Claiborne, and The Waterboy. As a young woman, Bates got a degree in theater at Southern Methodist University, then worked as a waitress and sold trinkets in the souvenir shop at the New York Museum of Modern Art. She started landing bit parts and became a noted stage presence, starring in several hit plays that were subsequently adapted as motion pictures without her. The play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, for example, featured Bates playing a plain-looking waitress, but when the movie was made the role went to dumpy Michelle Pfeiffer.