Kathy Bates

Kathy Bates is an American actress whose five-decade career has produced multiple defining American film and TV roles — particularly her 1990 Best Actress Academy Award win for Rob Reiner's Misery. She was born Kathleen Doyle Bates on June 28, 1948, in Memphis, Tennessee, into an American working-class family. Her father Langdon Doyle Bates was a Memphis-area mechanical engineer at the Memphis Compress Company, and her mother Bertye Kathleen Talbot was a homemaker. Her great-great-grandfather (on her mother's side) was 19th-century American politician John C. Calhoun.

Her education at Southern Methodist University (B.A. in Theater, 1970) launched her early-career path. Her 1970 New York City arrival and her subsequent 1970s and 1980s Off-Broadway theatrical career across multiple New York productions — particularly her 1983 Broadway lead role in 'night, Mother (for which she received the 1983 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play nomination) — launched her late-1980s American film career.

Her 1990 lead role as deranged fan-stalker Annie Wilkes in Rob Reiner's Misery (the Stephen King-novel adaptation, opposite James Caan) won her the 1991 Best Actress Academy Award. The film made her the first actress to win the Best Actress Academy Award for a horror-genre film since Sissy Spacek's 1976 nomination for Carrie.

Her subsequent film career has produced multiple defining American films — particularly Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes (1991, opposite Jessica Tandy), James Cameron's Titanic (1997, in which she played the Titanic's eccentric Molly Brown), Mike Nichols's Primary Colors (1998, opposite John Travolta — earning her the 1999 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination), Alexander Payne's About Schmidt (2002, earning her the 2003 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination), and Tate Taylor's The Help (2011). Her later TV career has produced multiple American TV roles — particularly her 2011–2014 Emmy Award-winning recurring roles across Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story anthology TV series and her 2019 lead role on Netflix's The Highwaymen. She has been single since her 1991–1997 marriage to American writer Tony Campisi.

Her name Kathy derives from the English diminutive of Katherine (from the Greek Aikaterinē meaning "pure"). Kathy was a popular American girls' name through the 1950s and 1960s.