Looking at Kathy Bates, it’s hard to imagine anything shaking her confidence. The Academy Award-winner can seemingly take on any role with ease, from the timid Evelyn Church in Fried Green Tomatoes, to a controlling matriarch in the Adam Sandler comedy The Waterboy, to the title role in the recent Matlock revival, which recently earned her a Best Actress Emmy nomination. But in a new interview with Variety, Bates reveals that she had “no clue” how to handle herself when she first experienced fame following her breakout role in Misery — a situation that she believes impacted her ability to turn in a good performance in her follow up film, Fried Green Tomatoes.
Despite being 42 at the time, Bates thought of herself as “just like a child… In fact, there’s a picture of me getting out of a car wearing a black-lace bib and a white bra underneath — just so tacky! I just always felt like it was a nightmare. I just felt so ill-prepared, like a country bumpkin.”
“Looking back on those years, I felt unprotected,” said Bates. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was a middle-class kid from Memphis, Tennessee, with older parents, and really 20 years behind the times. I didn’t know anything about anything, and it haunted me for years.”
Bates’s early success came on the stage and small screen, with appearances in The Love Boat, St. Elsewhere and soap operas like All My Children and One Life to Live. By the 1980s, she had established a reputation as a fine stage actress, but in the 1990s, she became a movie star thanks to the film adaptation of Stephen King‘s Misery.
Her performance won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Actress, and her character, Annie Wilkes, is considered one of the most diabolical movie villains of all time.
You’d think that confidence would carry on for the rest of her life? Not so. Her next film was the adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes, and though it earned her a BAFTA Award nomination, Bates looks back at the time with regret.
“I could have done a really good job with that part, and I didn’t do nearly enough,” she says. But now, at age 77, Bates feels comfortable enough in her own skin. And she’s not slowing down at all.
“I hope this keeps going,” she told Variety about her career. “I love doing this.”
