Bates won the 1991 Best Actress Academy Award for her chilling performance as Annie Wilkes in the 1990 film Misery.
In a new interview on CBS Sunday Morning, Bates told interviewer Ben Mankiewicz that her mother had a typically matter-of-fact reaction to her Oscar win.
“She said, ‘I don’t know what all the excitement’s about, you didn’t discover the cure for cancer’,” she recalled.
Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her role as Annie Wilkes in the movie Misery.
Despite that somewhat brutal reaction, Bates said one part of her Oscar acceptance speech haunts her to this day: she forgot to thank her mother, Bertye, who died in 1997 at the age of 90.
Kathy Bates broke through as the chilling Annie Wilkes in Misery, a role that earned her an Oscar. Reflecting on her win, Bates fondly remembers her mother's humorous reaction and believed she missed an opportunity to honor her mother's sacrifices. Here, she discovers she hadn't. https://cbsn.ws/3XYk4pB
So he did, and presented Bates with a tablet so she could watch the speech again herself 33 years on.
Sure enough, Bates thanked “my family, my friends, and my mum at home”.
Watching the clip back, the star’s face dropped as she realised the regret she’d held all these years was in fact misplaced.
She appeared speechless until Mankiewicz asked her what she was thinking.
“Thank you. Why did I think I didn’t thank her? Oh, what a relief.”
Asked why that had meant so much to her, Bates explained that her mother “should’ve had [her] life”.
“When she died, I said, ‘Come into me’. I wanted her spirit to come into me. Even though we had so many difficulties, I wanted her spirit to come into me and enjoy everything I was enjoying, because of what she’d given up.
“Wow. Thank you so much for that.”
Antony Starr (left), Kathy Bates (centre) and Giancarlo Esposito (right) on stage during the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards on September 15, in Los Angeles. Photo / Getty Images
“This made me choke up. You can just see how long she’d carried that weight and the shift of relief of having it lifted,” one person wrote under CBS Sunday Morning’s Facebook post about the interview.
“I cried tears of joy for her,” said another.
Earlier in the interview, Bates spoke more about the sacrifices her parents had gone through to help her, revealing they delayed their retirement to fund her education.
“My father literally had a heart attack after two or three years of giving up… he had to spend a fortune we didn’t have to send me to Southern Methodist University, and went to work when he was in his 70s. They gave up so much.”
Now 76, Bates recently made a retirement announcement of her own: her current acting role, starring in a reboot of the TV crime drama Matlock, will be her last.
“Everything I’ve prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it,” she told the New York Times. “And it’s exhausting.
