Casting agents told Kathy Bates she wasn't pretty enough; she won an Oscar
Early in her career Kathy Bates heard from more than one casting agent that her looks would hold her back. She kept taking odd, older, stranger parts, worked the till at the Museum of Modern Art, and two decades later won Best Actress for terrifying audiences as Annie Wilkes in Misery.
Kathleen Doyle Bates was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 28, 1948, the youngest of three daughters. Her father, Langdon, was a mechanical engineer and her mother, Bertye, a homemaker from South Carolina. The family tree had some colour: her grandfather Finis Bates was a lawyer and writer, and an Irish ancestor who settled in New Orleans served as doctor to President Andrew Jackson. She finished high school early in 1965, studied theatre at Southern Methodist University, and headed for New York in 1970.
The city was not welcoming. Between small stage parts she took whatever jobs she could, including cashier work at MoMA. Her screen debut came in Miloš Forman's Taking Off, where she was billed as Bobo Bates. She later told The New York Times she had never been an ingenue, only a character actor, and that facing how people judged her appearance hurt as much as the lack of work.
The stage built her reputation first. Her Off-Broadway debut was Vanities in 1976, Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother brought a Tony nomination in 1983, and a Terrence McNally play, Frankie and Johnny, won her an Obie. Film success then arrived in a rush with Misery (1990). Further Oscar nominations followed for Primary Colors, About Schmidt and Richard Jewell, and she turned up in films as varied as Titanic, The Waterboy and Midnight in Paris.
Television has given her a second career. She won Emmys for playing a ghostly Charlie Harper in Two and a Half Men and the cruel Delphine LaLaurie in American Horror Story: Coven, and since 2024 she has headlined a new Matlock on CBS. After a double mastectomy left her with lymphedema, a swelling condition, she became a spokesperson for the Lymphatic Education and Research Network.
Source: Kathy Bates
