Watch Kathy Bates Get Emotional After Learning She Actually Did Thank Her Mother in Oscars Speech

Kathy Bates and her mother might have had a difficult relationship, but the actress, 76, couldn’t hold back her emotion as she learned during a CBS Sunday Morning interview that she had actually thanked her mom in her 1991 Oscar acceptance speech. 

Speaking with Ben Mankiewicz in an interview that aired Sunday, Oct. 6, Bates recalled her mother’s response to her Best Actress win for Misery. “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.

The Matlock star continued by saying she had forgotten to thank her mom during her acceptance speech, but Mankiewicz shared a clip revealing she actually did. “I’d like to thank my family, my friends,” Bates says in the clip while accepting her Academy Award, “my mom at home, my dad, who I hope is watching somewhere…”

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Bates’ face dropped upon hearing that she had in fact thanked her mother, and she brought her hands to her mouth in shock. Visibly emotional, Bates told Mankiewicz, “Thank you! Why did I think I didn’t thank her? Oh, what a relief.”

Through tears, Bates explained that her strong reaction came because her mother “should have had my life.” She continued, “When she died, I said, ‘Come into me.’ I wanted her spirit to come into me. 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 had previously shared earlier in the interview that her parents had delayed their own retirement to send her to college. “My father literally had a heart attack after two or three years of giving up… he had to spend a fortune we didn’t have to send me to Southern Methodist University, and went to work when he was in his 70s,” she remembered. “They gave up so much.”

Bates told The New York Times last month that she actually had been considering retirement herself before she was approached with Matlock. “Everything I’ve prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it. And it’s exhausting,” she told the outlet at the time, adding, “This is my last dance.”

During Sunday’s interview with Mankiewicz, Bates shared that a negative experience on an undisclosed film made her question working in Hollywood much longer. “I think when you feel that kind of betrayal, it really devastates,” she explained. Having taken on her role on Matlock, however, Bates said she is “not retiring” any longer, clarifying, “I’d love to stay with the show as long as it runs, and I hope it runs a very long time.”