Kathy Bates To Be Honored With Top Award

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Kathy Bates, one of Hollywood’s best known and most talented actresses, is to receive a special award after 35 years in the business.

This December, she will be presented the Mary Pickford Award for her “outstanding contribution” to entertainment at the Satellite Awards in Beverly Hills.

And it is no more than she deserves having received three Best Actress Oscar nominations, winning it once for her role as a deranged nurse in 1990 movie Misery.

Her other Best Actress nominations were for Primary Colors in 1999 and About Schmidt in 2003.

As well as her many movie appearances, she has also dabbled in directing having taken the director’s chair for episodes of NYPD Blue and Six Feet Under.

President of the International Press Agency, which will present the award, Mirjana Van Blaricom said in a statement that Bates has given “complete and total dedication to the roles she has chosen.

“She embodies a genuine reflection of the best performers who have made the entertainment industry what it is today.”

Other winners of the Mary Pickford Award include Jodie Foster, Francis Ford Coppola and Susan Sarandon.

Born in 1948, Bates moved to New York in 1970 to pursue an acting career and got her first big break starring alongside Dustin Hoffman in Straight Time in 1978.

She grew in prominence through the 1980s but it was her Oscar-winning performance as nurse Annie Wilkes in Misery that really cast her into the limelight. She has since appeared in scores of films including Fried Green Tomatoes, Titanic and Failure to Launch.

Most recently, she has added her familiar voice to two children’s movies, Charlotte’s Web and Bee Movie.