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Kathy Bates
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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.
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Kathy Bates is an Academy Award-winning actress who earned her reputation on Broadway. She won the Best Actress Oscar and the Golden Globe for her portrayal of Annie Wilkes in Misery in 1990 and has appeared in such critically acclaimed films as Titanic, Dolores Claiborne, and Fried Green Tomatoes. Twice nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performances as Roberta Herzel in About Schmidt and Libby Holden in Primary Colors, she has ... directed five episodes of HBO’s critically acclaimed Six Feet Under. She recently completed the filming of Bonneville, a feature film with Jessica Lange and Joan Allen.
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Kathy Bates now seems to pretty much have it all. She's a director (she ... helmed several episodes of Six Feet Under), a star, an Officer of the Academy (she got to announce the nominations in 2003) and a keen benefactor, funding a Beverly Hills hospital for women recovering from cancer. And she no longer has to take any nonsense in the casting game. When her role as Grandma Mirabeau in Julia Stiles' Carolina was handed to Shirley Maclaine, she sued the producers for $1.25 million. Really, after all she's been through, they picked the wrong girl to mess with.
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Kathy Bates performed in little-seen films such as Summer Heat and The Morning After, and guest-starred in television shows such as L.A. Law before landing the role of obsessed fan Annie Wilkes, who holds her favorite author (played by James Caan) captive in the 1990 thriller Misery, which was based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. Kathy received her first Academy Award nomination for that role, winning Best Actress. Soon after, she starred with Jessica Tandy in the acclaimed 1991 movie Fried Green Tomatoes. In 1995, Bates turned in another applauded portrayal as the title character in Dolores Claiborne, and earned rave reviews for her role as the acid-tongued "dustbuster" political advisor Libby Holden in the 1998 semi-biographical film, Primary Colors, for which she won her second Academy Award nomination for Best supporting actress, though she did not win. She was nominated again in 2002 for About Schmidt, though she again did not win.
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In the new film About Schmidt, Kathy Bates plays Roberta Hertzel -- an aging hippie and free spirit. Jack Nicholson plays the repressed insurance salesman Warren Schmidt. In one scene Bates strips nude in front of Nicholson. It's the scene everyone is talking about. NPR's Michele Norris talks with Kathy Bates about the scene and about her career in film.
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Actress Kathy Bates has been involved in the arts in one way or another since graduating from Southern Methodist University. Among the Memphis native's earliest jobs were a stint as a singing waitress in a Catskill resort and a sojourn as a gift shop cashier in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Bates was type-cast in character roles early on, which assured her a lot more work than the thousands of faceless ingenues in the business. Her film debut occurred with 1971's Taking Off, and she made her off-Broadway debut five years later in Vanities. For a long while, Bates made her name on the stage, only to see her roles go to other actresses in the plays' subsequent film adaptations. In 1983, she was nominated for a Tony award for her stage appearance as a garrulous would-be suicide in 'Night, Mother, a role played on screen by Sissy Spacek.
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Kathy Bates