Kathy Bates Biography

It really couldn't have been much tougher. Supporting herself by working as a singing waitress at a Catskills resort, and as a gift shop cashier at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Kathy found work very hard to come by. She did, though, credited as Bobo Bates, make her screen debut. This was in Taking Off, directed by Milos Forman who, 4 years later, would clean up with Jack Nicholson and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The film concerned a teenage runaway whose parents try pot and strip poker in order to understand their daughter's liberated attitudes. The girl has, in fact, bunked off to attend singing auditions, and the movie's cut through with scenes from the auditions. Kathy, who wrote her own song, And Even Horses Had Wings, performed as one of the other hopefuls - another was no less than Carly Simon.

Eventually, recognising that it just wasn't happening in New York, Kathy moved on to regional theatre in Washington DC then, in 1973, moved down to Middleton, Virginia, to join the Wayside Children's Theatre, making her debut as a duck in Virginia Folk Tales. She recalls this as one of her hardest working periods, with the troupe playing every school in Virginia, as well as many in North Carolina.

Come 1976, she was back in New York, making her off-Broadway debut as Joanne, one of the Texas belles in Vanities. The production was a reasonable success, moving on for a spell in Los Angeles, where Kathy would also nab a small part as a bride in an episode of The Love Boat. Yet still work would not come; casting directors just couldn't get past her looks. It must have been soul-destroying. All that arrived was a small role as the put-upon wife of Gary Busey in Straight Time, where Busey played the unreliable buddy of Dustin Hoffman, an ex-con being forced off the straight and narrow.

But Kathy kept on and, now entering her thirties, joined the Actors' Theatre in Louisville. Here she starred in Crimes Of The Heart, Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play concerning racism, ageing, murder, suicide and all-out weirdness in the South, Kathy playing Lenny McGrath, the eldest of three freaky sisters. Both Kathy and the play went down well, but more importantly, working in Louisville introduced her to writer Marsha Norman and actress Anne Pitomak. Norman had written a play called 'Night Mother, concerning the last night the suicidal Jessie spends with her mum, and was ironing out the details. She invited Kathy and Pitomak over to her apartment for a cold reading and, by the end, all three were in tears. So well had the pair performed that Jesse, originally written as a skinny woman, was altered to suit Bates. This would soon stand her in very good stead.

After Crimes Of The Heart, and a spell in The Art Of Dining, Kathy moved back to New York and in 1980 made her Broadway debut in the short-lived Goodbye Fidel, appearing alongside Jane Alexander, an esteemed actress recently Oscar-nominated for Kramer Vs Kramer. Next came another of her signature roles, as Stella Mae in Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Here The Disciples Of James Dean, a club of five women in the small, dying town of McCarthy, Texas, reunite to share memories and revelations, Stella Mae being a stranger who destroys their delusions. It was brilliant, though often harrowing, and was quickly turned into a movie by Robert Altman, with Sandy Dennis as the ever-romantic group-leader, Cher as the blousy sex symbol with an appalling secret and, for the first of very few times, Kathy in the role she'd originated onstage.

And now came the first real break, when 'Night Mother opened at the Harvard American Repertory Theatre in January, 1983. Kathy really shone as the garrulous but seriously depressed Jesse, leading the New York Times to say "she simply embodies the daughter's dull, anonymous personality". By the end of March, the play had moved to the John Golden Theatre on Braodway. It would earn Kathy her first Tony nomination.

Yet still she was not considered right for meaty cinematic roles. She played The Furniture Man's Wife when John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John re-teamed for Two Of A Kind, then played a Romanian judge in a biopic of gymnast Nadia Comaneci. They weren't big parts, but Kathy was rapidly learning how to dominate the few scenes she had. And this was something she'd now do when, in 1984, she took a recurring role in the long-running soap All My Children, appearing as Belle Bodelle, the cell-mate of star Susan Lucci's Erika Kane. Bates was not the only star to make their TV bones on this show. Lauren Holly would do so in the late Eighties, and Sarah Michelle Gellar in the early Nineties.

Early 1985 saw her back onstage in Curse Of The Starving Class as Ella Tate, the mother of a struggling farm family, dreaming of escape despite a drunken husband, two kids coming of age and a crook trying to diddle them out of everything. The play was a success, but now Kathy suffered a double misfortune. First she was overlooked for the part of Lenny McGrath in the film version of Crimes Of The Heart, the role going to the more glamorous Diane Keaton, her sisters being played by Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange. Also starring, coincidentally was Lange's real-life lover Sam Shepard, who wrote Curse Of The Starving Class.

Then there was a screen version of 'Night Mother, where Kathy found herself again overlooked, with Spacek this time stepping into the role she'd created. This was particularly hard as Kathy, who'd suffered for years with depression (as a teen she'd written many songs about death), had grown very close to her character, Jesse. Indeed her feelings of identification had been so overwhelming she'd had to undergo therapy.

Painfully, both movies were well received, Spacek being nominated for an Oscar for Crimes Of The Heart, as was Jane Fonda for The Morning After, a movie in which Kathy did get a (tiny) role. Katy must have thought that only the good-looking and the famous get a look-in.

Nevertheless, she kept going. 1986 brought Johnny Bull, where an English girl joins her husband Peter MacNichol (later of Ally McBeal fame) in a Pennsylvania coal town in the Fifties and must cope with his disapproving dad, Jason Robards, and dim-witted sister, played by Kathy. Then she played reporter Bobbi Burk in Murder Ordained where Keith Carradine investigated the suspicious deaths of the spouses of a priest and his secretary. And there was another small role in Summer Heat where Lori "Fame" Singer was a neglected farm wife in the Depression, enjoying an affair with a hired hand and plotting to kill her husband. It was all good experience, but not the kind of work her talent deserved.

She had more luck onstage, and another breakthrough beckoned in 1987. Impressed with her work, playwright Terrance E. McNally wrote a lead role for her in his Frankie And Johnnie In The Clair De Lune. Here she played a jaded waitress who has a one-night stand with one of the chefs, played by Kenneth Welsh. She thinks it's just that - a one nighter - and he spends the rest of the play trying to convince her that she can be loved and they do have a future together. It was sweet and moving, and Kathy was superb, winning an Obie, as well as an LA Drama Critics Award when the production moved to the Mark Taper Forum.

Being replaced by Carol Kane, Kathy moved on to herself replace Amy Irving as South African school-teacher Elsa Barlow in Athol Fugard's The Road To Mecca. In the meantime, there were more small screen roles. In My Best Friend Is A Vampire, Robert Sean Leonard was a reluctant High School bloodsucker who falls for cutie Cheryl Pollak, Kathy playing her mother. Then, in Arthur 2: On The Rocks, she was an adoption agent dealing with prospective parents Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli.

And then came the biggest blow of all. Frankie and Johnny was to be adapted for the Silver Screen and who could play the dowdy waitress better than the woman the part was written for? Well, Michelle Pfeiffer could, according to the powers that be, Kenneth Welsh being replaced by Al Pacino. Losing out to another siren was too much. "I've always had a problem with my weight," said Kathy later. "I'm not a stunning woman, I never was an ingenue. I've always just been a character actor... 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'".

"On my bad days," she continued "I got tired of developing material for Sissy Spacek and other stars. I started to think 'Well, what am I up here bustin' my hump for, while they're out there picking the gardenias off the bushes?'" In 1989, after the Pfeiffer farrago, she decided her best chance lay at the heart of the action, and moved to Los Angeles.

Immediately, the parts came. Not big ones, but plenty of them. First there was the Emmy-winning Roe Vs Wade, where Holly Hunter starred in the true story of Norma McCorvey, challenging Texas's abortion laws back in 1973. Then there was Lee Grant's socially-minded No Place Like Home, where a family's home burns down and they're caught in the poverty trap. And then there was Signs Of Life, where a Maine boatyard is closing down and foreman Beau Bridges quietly cracks up as his wife, Kathy, is having a baby. After this came High Stakes, a Mob thriller where Sarah Michelle Gellar was kidnapped, and then Men Don't Leave, where Jessica Lange tries to bring up two sons when her husband dies.

These were all brief parts, but at last the productions grew more prestigious. Next Kathy appeared in Warren Beatty's all-star comic-trip Dick Tracy. Then came White Palace, where well-to-do ad exec James Spader embarked on a sizzling affair with an older waitress, Susan Sarandon.

And then it all changed. Having lost out on Frankie And Johnny, Kathy found herself being offered the lead in Misery. This was an odd project that was far from a sure-fire hit. A gruelling Stephen King psycho-fest, set for the most part in one room, it was to be directed by Rob Reiner (better known for such light-hearted fare as The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally) and to star James Caan who'd been next-to-invisible since his Seventies hey-day. Add to the mix the unknown Kathy and, well, not much was expected. King flicks were usually rubbish anyway, weren't they?

But Kathy turned all that around. As nurse Annie Wilkes, who digs writer Caan from the snow after a terrible accident and takes him home to recuperate, she was unbelievably good. First you think she's sweetly eccentric, describing herself as the "Number One fan" of Caan and Misery Chastain, the heroine of his soap-style period novels. Then she begins to turn when she reads his latest manuscript (he has killed Misery so he can move on to become a "serious" writer), and berates him with a thoroughly strange "You, you dirty bird, how could you?" before demanding that he re-write his own book under her severe scrutiny. She will not let him leave till he does.

Now begins the fun as Caan must placate her with his written words, while plotting his escape. But she is super-vigilant and increasingly loopy, and when she discovers he's sneaked out of his room she commits one of the most heinous atrocities ever perpetrated onscreen. It's called hobbling and it's really not very nice. And she gets madder, slipping between bouncy exuberance and catatonic menace, as when she dreamily tells Caan "I have this gun. Sometimes I think about using it. I'd better go...", and she begins to slaughter all intruders. It is not the first time, we discover, that she has taken lives.

As said, Kathy was utterly convincing in the part, despite obvious temptations to ham it up, and she deservedly took the Best Actress Oscar. She would not be human if she didn't gloat a tad at the simultaneous failure of Frankie And Johnny, and particularly at the criticism that, now matter how good an actress Pfeiffer was, she was simply too glamorous for the role. Now, starved of decent material for so long, Bates would launch herself into a schedule that would make her one of the most prolific screen actresses of the Nineties.

She began the run with At Play In The Fields Of The Lord, written by Jean-Claude Carriere, author of her very first flick, Taking Off. Here, alongside Aidan Quinn, she played a repressed but zealous missionary in the jungle, wracked by grief at the death of their son. This was followed by another big hit, Fried Green Tomatoes. Here she was excellently cast, and Golden Globe-nominated, as the frumpy Evelyn Couch, suffering low-esteem and a couch-bound husband. Visiting a nursing-home she comes across Jessica Tandy, who tells her tales of non-conformity, racism and lesbianism in the old South, inspiring Couch to deal with her own problems. This same year, 1991, just after receiving her Oscar, Kathy wed fellow actor and longtime boyfriend Tony Campisi - the marriage would last just six years.

Now established, Kathy moved on to a string of out-of-the-ordinary movies. In Prelude To A Kiss, Alec Baldwin is getting married to Meg Ryan when a mysterious old man comes in and kisses the bride. Imagine Alec's surprise when he discovers, on his honeymoon that Meg's body is now inhabited by a different personality. Kathy played the equally surprised daughter of the old man. Next came Used People, where she was the overweight, neurotic and depressive daughter of harpy Shirley Maclaine. Will things change for the better when mum meets charmer Marcello Mastroianni?

Always maintaining her friends in theatre, Kathy now reprised on screen her Elsa Barlow in The Road To Mecca, then joined Colin Firth in Hostages, the true-life story of Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Brian Keenan, long-term captives in the Lebanon. There'd also be brief reunions with her Misery buddies with a bit-part in Stephen King's epic The Stand, and another in Rob Reiner's North. Here young Elijah Wood leaves his inconsiderate parents Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus and undergoes a hugely sentimental journey in search of better ones - Kathy appearing as a prospective Eskimo mother.

But she also managed to lay her hands on some more substantial roles. In A Home Of Our Own she played a 1950s Irish-Catholic widow and mother of 6 who takes her family from LA to a shack in Idaho, to save eldest son Edward Furlong from a life of crime. Keeping it dead-straight, without resorting to marshmallow tactics, she gave the movie a real heart, as she did in the screen version of Curse Of The Starving Class, where James Woods played her drunken husband and Randy Quaid the con man after their land.

And then came another killer performance as she returned to Stephen King once more with Dolores Claiborne. Here Jennifer Jason Leigh was a big-city reporter who returns to her Maine island home where mother Kathy is accused of murdering an old lady in her care. She's in bad trouble as detective Christopher Plummer is sure she also killed her husband years before and is psychotically keen to take her down. Kathy was brilliant with Leigh, understanding her pain but struggling to help in the face of her daughter's cynicism, bitterness and subconscious memory-blocks. She's great with Plummer, facing down his crude threats, better still in flashback with the superior, frightened and aggressive old lady, Judy Parfitt. But the scenes showing life with her husband, David Strathairn, were amazing. He was so repulsive in his casual, spiteful abuse, she was so crushed in spirit yet steadfast in her support of her daughter. When she's finally had enough, when he smacks her with a block of wood and, wincing horribly, she looks him in the eye and says, if he does it again, "One of us is going to the boneyard", she makes total sense of everything that happens next. Though there was exceptionally strong competition that year, she should surely have been Oscar-nominated again.

The same year, 1995, brought Kathy's directorial debut. Talking With was based on a stage play by Jane Martin (really Jon Jory, the artistic director of Louisville's Human Theatre festival) and featured a series of monologues by women. There was a snake handler, a daughter, a baton twirler, an old lady and a has-been rodeo cowgirl, each talking to camera and variously played by Frances McDormand, Marcia Gay Harden, Beverly D'Angelo, Celeste Holm and Kathy herself. It was a tribute to her status that she could draw together such esteemed personnel. She'd quickly go on to helm episodes of NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life On The Street and Oz, as well as a failed pilot for a series based on Fargo.

After Talking With came another run of often brief but always memorable roles. In Angus, she played a trucker known as Bruiser, whose fat but smart son is besotted by a girl at school who's already taken by smarmy jock James Van Der Beek. There can be little doubt that Kathy took the movie because of who wins in the end. Next she was back with Shirley Maclaine in The West Side Waltz, where ageing neighbours Maclaine and Liza Minnelli find solace in making music. And then there was The Late Shift. This ought to have been a reasonably interesting account of the late-night-TV war between David Letterman and Jay Leno once Johnny Carson was gone, but Kathy, as Leno's foul-mouthed and incredibly abrasive producer Helen Kushnik, took it to a whole new level. For her wild efforts she won a Golden Globe, an Emmy nomination and her first American Comedy Award.

On she went to Diabolique, playing a detective on the case as Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani do the dirty on Adjani's hubbie, Chazz Palminteri. Interestingly, the detective in the 1955 French original was the inspiration behind Columbo. Next came The War At Home, where Emilio Estevez returned from war and, his innocence betrayed, could no longer cope with the religion and strict morality of mum Kathy. Then there was a small role in Swept From The Sea, directed by Beeban "Used People" Kidron. Here a Russian peasant is washed ashore in 1888 Cornwall, scaring everyone but Rachel Weisz, who works for rich folk Joss Ackland and his bedridden wife, Kathy.

If things had been going well, as she approached 50 they got even better. 1997 saw her as the nouveau riche "Unsinkable" Molly Brown, supporting the forbidden love of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and adding human warmth to the SFX extravaganza that was James Cameron's mega-hit Titanic. Then she was back with Travolta in Primary Colours, employed as the "dust-buster" on his Bill Clinton-style presidential campaign. As with Titanic, she dominated her scenes as a dynamic, rude, hard-living lesbian, digging dirt to keep her client squeaky clean. Once more she was Oscar-nominated, and won another American Comedy Award.

Next came another $100 million hit with The Waterboy, where she played Adam Sandler's freaky mum, boiling alligators out in the Florida swampland and trying to save her boy from the no-doubt unsavoury attentions of temptress Fairuza Balk. Kathy had thought little of the part until her young niece begged her to take it. After a second brief appearance as a judge, once more with Travolta in A Civil Action, she returned to her earliest roots with Annie. Here, as Miss Agatha Hannigan, she played the cruel head of an orphanage, with Alan Cumming as her sleazy son. Seething, shouting and singing Little Girls, she was nominated for an Emmy and Golden Globe and took her third American Comedy Award.

1999 brought yet more honours when she directed her first feature proper. Dash And Lilly concerned the overblown affair between writers Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, as Hammett served in two wars, contracted TB and was jailed in the McCarthy era, while Hellman was branded a Commie. Fifteen years after working on Sam Shepard's Curse Of The Starving Class, she here directed him as Hammett, with Judy Davis as Hellman and Bebe Neuwirth as Dorothy Parker. Once more she was Emmy-nominated - this time as director (the film would win 9 nominations in all) - with a further nomination coming for her guest slot on comedy show 3rd Rock From The Sun. Strange how this deadly serious stage actress - Hobblin' Annie Wilkes, for God's sake! - should have so often been lauded for her comic talents.

Now came a run of oddities, as if Kathy were looking for small roles to interest her before the next big project. She helped out in Bruno, Shirley Maclaine's directorial debut, playing a Mother Superior helping to bully Maclaine's genius grandson. She sold squirrels in the roustabout comedy Rat Race, then played the mother of Colin Farrell's Jesse James in American Outlaws.

There would be more substantial roles in Love Liza, where Philip Seymour Hoffman falls apart when his wife commits suicide, becoming addicted to video games and petrol fumes and desperately avoiding an inevitable confrontation with his wife's mother, Kathy. Then, in My Sister's Keeper, she was a schizophrenic, entirely dependent on others, whose sister, big-city art editor Elizabeth Perkins must step up when their mother dies. After this she added weight to the vaguely supernatural Dragonfly, playing Kevin Costner's vivacious lesbian neighbour, offering to look after his parrot while he travels to Venezuela looking for his dead wife. Hmmm.

2002 brought yet more success with About Schmidt, where Jack Nicholson was a lost, embittered and emotionally unavailable widower off to see his daughter and her fiance, of whom he absolutely disapproves. Once more Kathy stood out, as the fiance's charming hippy mother, causing a furore when she slips topless into a hot-tub with Nicholson, evidently available and scaring the poor fellow half to death. At last Kathy's weight scored a big plus, as the un-svelte cheered her courageous nudity in their millions.

Then came two more oddities. In Unconditional Love, dumped by hubbie Dan Aykroyd, she went to London for the funeral of her murdered favourite pop star, Jonathan Pryce, met his lover Rupert Everett and, together, they sought the killer. Next would come Peter Greenaway's long-awaited The Tulse Luper Suitcase, following a man over 60 years of the 20th Century, criss-crossing the globe from Wales to Kubla Khan's Xanadu. Joining Kathy in a wildly varied cast would be Victoria Abril, Franka Potente, Vincent Gallo, and William Hurt.

Kathy Bates now seems to pretty much have it all. She's a director (she also 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.

Dominic Wills