For years, Kathy Bates has believed she missed thanking someone pivotal during her acceptance speech after she won the Oscar for best actress in 1991 for her performance in “Misery.”
During an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” in which she promoted her new series “Matlock,” Bates talked to Ben Mankiewicz about her Oscar moment and her mother, Bertye’s, response.
“When I won the Oscar for ‘Misery,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what all the excitement [is] about, you didn’t discover the cure for cancer,’” Bates recalled.
She also said she forgot to thank her mom during her acceptance speech, but Mankiewicz disputed that and showed her a video of her remarks in which she did, in fact, acknowledge her mother.
Bates was shocked and became visually emotional.
“Thank you,” she said to Mankiewicz. “Why did I think I didn’t thank her?”
The elder Bates died in 1997 and her daughter said her mother “should have had my life.”
“When she died, I said come into me. I wanted her spirit to come into me,” Bates said. “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.”
Bates has said that starring in the reboot of the procedural drama “Matlock” will be her final role as she plans on retiring.
