Kathy Bates left speechless as interviewer gives her big family revelation

Actress Kathy Bates was overcome with emotion when an interviewer cleared up a misconception she’d been holding for 33 years.

Oscar-winning actress Kathy Bates was overcome with emotion during a recent US television appearance, when her interviewer cleared up a misconception she’d been holding for more than three decades.

Bates won the 1991 Best Actress Academy Award for her chilling performance as Annie Wilkes in the 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.

Despite that somewhat brutal reaction, Bates said one part of her Oscar speech haunts her to this day: She forgot to thank her mother Bertye, who died in 1997 at the age of 90.

But, Mankiewicz insisted, she did thank her. “At the end of your speech, you did thank her.”

Bates was insistent. “No, I did not. I did not! You go back and look at it. I didn’t.”

Kathy Bates rewatches her 1991 Oscar speech …

… and can’t believe what she hears.

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 my 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.”

Bates said she wished her mother could’ve had her life.

The emotional moment struck a chord with viewers.

“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 both her parents had gone through to help her, revealing that 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.”

“This is my last dance.”

Originally published as Kathy Bates left speechless as interviewer gives her big family revelation