Kathy Bates

Kathy Bates spent the first fifteen years of her career on stage and in small screen parts, which is the standard route for an actress who has never been described as an ingenue and has said so herself. In 1983 she originated Jessie Cates in Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother on Broadway, a two-hander in which a woman calmly informs her mother that she intends to kill herself that evening. It brought a Tony nomination. When the film was made in 1986, the part went to Sissy Spacek.

It happened again almost immediately. Terrence McNally wrote Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune with Bates in mind and she opened it at the Manhattan Theatre Club in June 1987, opposite F. Murray Abraham. The 1991 film went to Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino. Bates said much later that the director could not imagine an audience watching her kiss anyone on screen. Two of the best written parts of the decade, created by her, and both handed to somebody else for the version most people saw.

Rob Reiner cast her as Annie Wilkes in Misery in 1990, and that settled it. Annie is a nurse who rescues a novelist from a car crash, installs him in her spare room, and breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer when his new book displeases her. Bates plays her as entirely reasonable, which is the whole trick. It won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in March 1991 and the Golden Globe two months earlier. She was forty-two and had never carried a film before.

The then-and-now angle for Bates is the inverse of everyone else's on this site, because her face was never the asset and so it was never the thing at risk. Fried Green Tomatoes in 1991, Dolores Claiborne in 1995, Titanic in 1997, then Oscar nominations for Primary Colors and About Schmidt. Emmys in 2012 and 2014. In 2025, at seventy-seven, she became the oldest woman ever nominated for the lead drama actress Emmy, for Matlock. Hers are the later photographs worth looking at.