The actor Kathy Bates has always been in love with: “tremendously excited”
One of the most admirable qualities about Kathy Bates is that she is willing to recognise talent in whatever form it takes.
Bates may have made history as the first actress to ever win an Oscar for a horror performance with Misery, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t also pop up in more humorous films like Happy Gilmore, Primary Colors, Midnight in Paris, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, such that, while remaining one of the defining movie stars of the 1990s, she’s managed to revitalise interest in network television with her award-winning performance on the reboot of Matlock.
Her ability to work within all areas of the industry may be because she doesn’t discriminate when it comes to the age of her directors, evidenced by her earning her most recent Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in Richard Jewell, directed by the 95-year-old Clint Eastwood, while also signing up to appear in The Life and Death of John F Donovan, an arthouse drama from the young Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan.
Bates admitted in an interview with Backstage that she had been crushing on Dolan ever since first seeing him in Tom at the Farm, a psychological drama that he wrote, directed, and starred in when he was only 24 years old. Dolan had been working actively as a performer and filmmaker from a very young age, which saw him debut his first film, I Killed My Mother, at the Cannes Film Festival right after turning 20.
She admitted that she was “tremendously excited” about working on The Life and Death of John F Donovan, and she clearly wasn’t the only prominent Hollywood star who showed an interest in working with Dolan. Despite being a relatively small-scale production that was eventually released by the tiny distributor Les Films Séville, the film had a stacked cast that included Natalie Portman, Susan Sarandon, Thandiwe Newton, Kit Harrington, Michael Gambon, Sarah Gadon, Jacob Tremblay, and Ben Schnetzer.
Bates had a relatively minor role in the film as Barbara Haggermaker, who managed the famous titular movie star John F Donovan, played by Harington, who has an ongoing secret communication with his child fan Rupert, played by Tremblay, that he keeps a secret for many years. It’s only after an older Rupert, played by Schnetzer, reveals his story to Newton’s reporter that the truth is unveiled.
There were tremendous expectations for The Life and Death of John F Donovan, as Dolan’s previous film Mommy had been a massive critical and major crossover hit with critics in the United States, but it became a major misfire.
Despite strong performances from the entire star-studded cast, the film was ultimately too convoluted and melodramatic for its own good, and lacked the emotional intimacy that had made previous Dolan films, like Tom at the Farm, so beloved.
Although The Life of Death of John F Donovan will ultimately end up being a footnote in any summations of Bates’ career, the nasty reviews hopefully didn’t spoil her experience working with Dolan. That said, the young filmmaker isn’t the only co-star she has admitted to being infatuated with, where in the same interview, she admitted to her attraction to Mads Mikkelsen, Noomi Rapace, Mathias Schoenaerts, Tom Hardy, and Johnny Depp, who she admitted she had loved “forever and ever”; maybe she should keep that last one to herself.
