March 1, 2003
BY: Amy Wallace
THE OTHER DAY, KATHY BATES WAS STANDING with a friend on a street corner in Beverly Hills when a stranger offered an appraisal of her hot body.
“This guy said, ‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you have really great nipples!’” Bates says, delighted. “I’m over 50. I’m overweight. I was never the Twiggy type. I just laughed hysterically before I could think to say, ‘Gee, would you like to take us out for a drink?’”
At this, Bates throws back her head and lets out one hell of a laugh — warm and rolling. Ever since she stepped naked into a hot tub with Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, Bates has gained something she’s never had before as a film actress: sex appeal.
In director Alexander Payne’s bleakly funny portrait of a repressed retiree who drives across the Midwest after the sudden death of his wife, Bates plays Roberta, a vivacious hippie who wears caftans, licks chicken juice off her fingers, and thinks nothing of getting naked with a man she hardly knows. The actress argues, however, that the movie is about more than one nude scene.
“No one would ever in their right mind expect to see a woman like myself do a nude scene, let alone with Jack Nicholson, and I appreciate that,” she says.
It’s dusk, and Bates, 54, is sitting barefoot on a gold sofa in the sunroom of her Hancock Park house. “But why is that so rare? It’s as if reality has become absurd and make-believe Hollywood is the norm.”
She looks a bit tired — she’s been at work all day, looping dialogue for a character she’s playing on the upcoming season of HBO’s Six Feet Under. She throws a comforter over her lap and lets her Yorkshire terriers, Griffin and Stella, settle in. After a career of being warned that her lack of glamour was a limitation — “When I was in my twenties, I remember people telling me, ‘You’re not really going to come into your own until your forties or fifties because you are a character actor’” — it’s great to be treated like cheesecake. But all the fuss over a single act of disrobing makes her a little sad, too. If it’s true that more Americans look like Bates than like Kate Hudson, then why doesn’t Hollywood acknowledge that?
The story has been told and retold about Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, which playwright Terrence McNally wrote with Bates in mind. She made it a hit off-Broadway in 1987, but when it came time to make the movie, Michelle Pfeiffer was given the part. Bates is over it — “You know what? Glamorous people don’t want to be limited by their glamorous looks any more than people who look sort of plain want to be limited by theirs.” But too often in movies, women are portrayed as either mad or beautiful, and by and large, Bates has occupied the mad end of the spectrum.
Who else could have played an obsessive fan who whacks a sledgehammer into James Caan’s ankles in Misery? No one in American movies can match Bates for her portrayals of women on the verge — think of Dolores Claiborne, the addled mother she plays in the movie of the same name, or Libby Holden, the disillusioned political strategist in Primary Colors. Even when she embodies someone legendary, as she did with the Unsinkable Molly Brown in Titanic, you know you are in the presence of a character who has had nothing handed to her on a platter.
In recent years the actress has pursued directing — her credits include the cable movie Dash and Lilly and episodes of Oz and Six Feet Under — though, she is quick to insist, “I’m no David Lean.” The hot tub scene in About Schmidt only came to after much discussion between Bates and Payne, who also cowrote the script. In the screenplay Roberta’s nakedness is described in graphic terms. Bates says it mentions the character’s hysterectomy scar being visible. The actress felt strongly that the scene should be less about what Roberta looked like naked and more about how comfortable she was getting naked.
“My character and Jack’s character are polar opposites, and this scene points it up more than anything else,” Bates says. “She is open to the point of just embarrassing the hell out of him. And he’s completely repressed and closed. So Alexander and I negotiated back and forth, sending emails. What we arrived at was something that made us both happy.”
Chances are good that this year Bates will receive her third Academy Award nomination (she got one for her supporting role in Primary Colors, and she won a Best Actress statuette for Misery). Whether or not she does, the actress, who serves on the Academy’s board of governors, will be at the ceremony. In all likelihood Nicholson will also be nominated. He has already won a Golden Globe for About Schmidt. In his acceptance speech, the actor inexplicably referred to Bates as that edifice from the horror movie Psycho — the Bates Motel.
“It was nothing he’s ever called me in my presence,” she says, arching a brow. But
she’ll let it go. During the many hours that they sat submerged in bubbling water together, getting out every few minutes “so our skin wouldn’t prune up,” Nicholson put her at ease by talking about the novelist Philip Roth. After the scene wrapped, Bates was stepping out of the tub for the last time when Nicholson told her something she’ll always remember.
“He said, ‘Beautiful work, honey,’ which I loved. Because he was making sure not to look anywhere he wasn’t supposed to,” she says, laughing again. “Beautiful work, honey,” she repeats, savoring the words.
