Born: 28 June 1948, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Kathleen Doyle Bates
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Kathy Bates had a fairly common start for an actor—she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University in 1969, moved to New York City the following year, and worked various jobs while trying to find acting work. She was able to get minor stage and film roles in the 1970s and 1980s and was even nominated for a Tony for her work in 1983’s ’Night, Mother. But her breakout role was undeniably as Annie Wilkes, a psychotic fan who imprisons her favorite author and forces him to rewrite his latest novel, in 1990’s Misery. The 42-year-old’s Best Actress Oscar for the performance makes the movie the only Stephen King film adaptation to win an Academy Award.
“I have always had a problem with my weight,” she told The New York Times in 1991. “I’m not a stunning woman. I never was an ingénue; I’ve always just been a character actor. When I was younger it was a real problem, because I was never pretty enough for the roles that other young women were being cast in. The roles I was lucky enough to get were real stretches for me: usually a character who was older, or a little weird, or whatever. And it was hard, not just for the lack of work but because you have to face up to how people are looking at you. And you think, ‘Well, y’know, I’m a real person.'”
Following Misery, Bates would work steadily in high-profile projects for decades to come, with several more Oscar nominations, as well as Golden Globes (one of them for Misery) and more than a dozen Emmy nominations. Among her various roles are several actual women from history: the “unsinkable” Molly Brown in Titanic (1997), writer Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris (2011), socialite and serial killer Delphine LaLaurie in American Horror Story: Coven (2013), lawyer and activist Dorothy Kenyon in the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex (2018) and Texas Gov. Miriam (“Ma”) Ferguson in the Netflix film The Highwaymen (2019), among others. Even that small sampling of her incredible body of work shows the versatility and skill Bates possesses, not least because of her ability to steal the show even in supporting roles.