Kathy Bates

Born: June 1948
Where: Memphis, Tennessee, USA

Bates made an indelible impression on the cinema viewing public as the deranged hammer-wieIding fan in the film adaptation of Stephen King's Misery.

The scene where she splinters James Caan' shin bone with a wooden mallet will forever be lodged in the memory.

As a young actress, her one admitted problem was a tendency to gain weight, and casting agents bluntly told her she was too unattractive for the roles for which she auditioned.

She made her feature debut as an auditioning singer performing a song she wrote in Milos Forman's Taking Off but quickly turned to the theatre.

She achieved her first taste of success in the 1976 Off-Broadway hit Vanities and was nominated for a Tony for the Broadway production of Mother.

While her stage career was blossoming, Bates was making small inroads in other media, most notably TV with a recurring role on All My Children.

Re-locating to LA, she made a concerted effort to raise her profile, appearing in Men Don't Leave and Dick Tracy before playing psychotic Annie Wilkes in Misery.

After receiving a Best Actress Oscar, she had a role in Fried Green Tomatoes, and it was embodying another of Stephen King's characters, Dolores Claiborne, that gave her career a boost.

She went on to win multiple awards and nominations - including an Academy Award nomination - for her turn as the hard-driving politco Libby Holden in the presidential campaign drama Primary Colours.

She also took small but pivotal and often comedic roles in A Civil Action, Rat Race, American Outlaws and Dragonfly on the big screen.

Her next career-defining performance came in About Schmidt, in which she was Golden Globe-nominated for Roberta Hertzel, the eccentric, low-class mother of Jack Nicholson's prospective son-in-law.

Recent work includes the role of trashy talk show host Kippie Kann in the otherwise lacklustre romantic comedy Little Black Book.