Kathy Bates Net Worth 2026: The $20M Oscar Fortune

Kathy Bates‘s net worth is estimated at $20 million to $22 million as of November 2026. The Oscar winner built that fortune across five decades of film, television and stage work, from her Academy Award-winning turn as Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990) to her late-career revival as the star and executive producer of CBS’s hit reboot Matlock, a role she took at 76 after telling The New York Times she was ready to retire.

Early Life and Background

Kathleen Doyle Bates was born on June 28, 1948, in Memphis, Tennessee, the youngest of three daughters of Langdon Doyle Bates, a mechanical engineer, and Bertye Kathleen Bates, a homemaker. Memphis in the late 1940s and 1950s gave her a Southern grounding that still colours her screen presence: the plain-spoken directness, the refusal to soften a character for likability, the comic timing that lands because it sounds like something a real person would say. Her grandfather, Finis L. Bates, was an author, so books and storytelling were part of the family air long before acting entered the picture.

Bates grew up in a comfortable middle-class household, not a show-business one. Nobody in her immediate family worked in film or television, and Memphis offered no obvious road into acting. What it did offer was a school system with a strong theatre programme and a local stage scene where a teenager could learn the craft. She has described herself as a shy child who found her voice on stage, and the pattern of her whole career — decades of steady stage work before film fame arrived — starts here. She did not chase celebrity young. She built skill first and let the work compound.

That slow build matters to the money story. Bates was 42 when Misery made her a star. By then she had already spent twenty years learning how to hold a stage, how to carry a scene without scenery-chewing, and how to make a living as a working actor. The fortune that followed was not a lottery win in her twenties. It was the payoff of a career that kept adding layers: stage fees in the 1970s, small film parts in the 1980s, a breakthrough salary in 1990, then three decades of steady, well-paid character work in film and television. Few of her peers can match that arc, and it explains why her net worth sits at a solid $20 million rather than the nine-figure sums of franchise leads: she earned it role by role, year by year, without ever headlining a superhero series or selling a company.

Memphis also shaped the roles she chose. Directors kept casting her as women with steel under a soft Southern exterior — the nurse who will not be crossed, the neighbour who knows more than she lets on, the mother holding a family together. Bates turned that typecasting into a career advantage, playing variations on formidable women for so long that the type itself became her brand.

Education

Bates attended White Station High School in Memphis, where she took part in school theatre, then enrolled at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre, a credential that put her ahead of many working actors of her generation, who often learned on the job alone. SMU’s theatre programme gave her formal training in voice, movement and classical text, and it gave her a network: Dallas in the late 1960s had a lively regional theatre scene, and Bates worked there before moving on.

She moved to New York City in 1970, at 22, with the degree in hand and no film contacts. New York stage work paid little in those years, and Bates spent the 1970s in the city’s theatres, taking small parts and building a reputation among directors and casting agents. The education paid off in a specific way: when the big film roles finally came, she arrived with a stage actor’s discipline — lines learned cold, blocking precise, ego checked at the door. Directors noticed. Rob Reiner, who cast her in Misery, has spoken about the completeness of her preparation, and that reputation for reliability is part of why she kept working into her late seventies while many of her contemporaries faded from casting lists.

The SMU degree also sits behind her directing career. Bates has directed episodes of prestige television — Six Feet Under, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz — and that second skill set added a separate income stream plus a different kind of industry standing. An actor who can also direct is harder to replace, and Bates used that advantage quietly for decades.

Career Journey

Bates made her film debut in Milos Forman’s Taking Off in 1971, a small part in a comedy about runaway teenagers that gave her a screen credit but no momentum. The 1970s passed largely on stage. She worked in New York theatre through the decade, and her film appearances stayed minor: Straight Time (1978) with Dustin Hoffman, then Robert Altman’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). On Broadway, she earned a Tony Award nomination in 1983 for her performance in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play ‘night, Mother, opposite Anne Pitoniak, playing a daughter spending a final evening with her mother. It was the kind of role that wins respect inside the profession without making its performer famous.

The 1980s added an Obie Award in 1988 for her stage performance in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and a few more film parts. She was 40, a respected stage actor with a Tony nomination and an Obie, earning a working actor’s living — comfortable, but nowhere near wealthy. Then, in 1989, she auditioned for a film adaptation of a Stephen King novel about a novelist held captive by his most devoted fan. The part was Annie Wilkes. The film was Misery.

After Misery, the work changed in scale but not in kind. Bates did not become a romantic lead or an action star. She became the most in-demand character actor in Hollywood, the performer directors called when a film needed a woman who could be funny, frightening and heartbreaking inside a single scene. The 1990s brought Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Dolores Claiborne (1995), Titanic (1997), Primary Colors (1998) and The Waterboy (1998) — five films in eight years that kept her visible, well paid and award-nominated. The 2000s added About Schmidt (2002), Revolutionary Road (2008) and The Blind Side (2009), plus a move into television drama that would define her second act.

Television gave Bates the steadiest income of her career. HBO’s The Late Shift (1996) brought her first Emmy nomination. Harry’s Law (2011–12) on NBC gave her a network lead and two more Emmy nominations. Guest spots on The Office and Two and a Half Men kept her in front of mass audiences, and the second of those won her an Emmy in 2012. Then came Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, where she played a run of unforgettable characters — the slave-owner Delphine LaLaurie in Coven (2013), which won her a second Emmy, followed by seasons in Freak Show, Hotel, Roanoke and Apocalypse. She returned as LaLaurie for the show’s thirteenth season in 2026, according to Celebrity Net Worth’s October 2026 update.

Alongside acting, Bates directed television through the 1990s and 2000s, including episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, Oz and Six Feet Under. Directing fees for prestige cable drama in that era ran well into five figures per episode, and the work kept her employed between acting jobs while deepening her standing with the networks that would later hire her as a series lead.

The through-line of the journey is durability. Bates has worked in every decade since 1970, in theatre, film and television, as an actor and a director. Her filmography runs past 120 film and television credits, according to Stover PT, and the box-office site The Numbers ranks her 164th among domestic stars with roughly $2.87 billion in cumulative box-office grosses attached to her films. She never had a $20 million payday for a single film. She had something rarer: fifty years without a gap.

Rise to Fame

The rise arrived all at once, at 42, with a sledgehammer. In Misery (1990), directed by Rob Reiner from Stephen King’s novel, Bates played Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who rescues her favourite novelist, played by James Caan, after a car crash — then holds him prisoner, breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer in the film’s most infamous scene, and demands he write the ending she wants. The performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama, and it made her the first woman ever to win the Best Actress Oscar for a horror film. The film grossed $61.3 million worldwide for Columbia Pictures, a strong return on a modest budget, and it turned a stage actor into a movie star overnight.

What made the rise stick was what came next. A single Oscar can fade fast if the follow-up flops. Bates followed Misery with Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), playing Evelyn Couch, a timid housewife who finds her spine through the stories of two women in 1920s Alabama. The film grossed $119.4 million worldwide, earned Bates a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA nomination, and proved she could carry a warm, commercial hit as well as a horror film. Dolores Claiborne (1995), a second Stephen King adaptation, cast her as a woman accused of murdering her husband; it underperformed at the box office but strengthened her reputation as King’s most reliable screen interpreter.

Then came the film that put her in front of the largest audience in cinema history. In James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), Bates played Margaret “Molly” Brown, the brash, big-hearted socialite who befriends Rose. The film earned more than $1.8 billion in its original run and over $2.2 billion with re-releases, winning eleven Oscars. Bates’s part was supporting, but Titanic made her face familiar to audiences in every country on earth, and that global recognition is the kind of asset that keeps an actor’s quote high for decades. Her Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio’s net worth later climbed into nine figures on the back of the same film, a useful contrast: Bates took the supporting-player path, steady money over decades, while DiCaprio took the leading-man path.

The Oscar nominations kept coming — Best Supporting Actress for Primary Colors (1998), where she played a foul-mouthed political fixer and won a Screen Actors Guild Award; Best Supporting Actress for About Schmidt (2002), as a free-spirited neighbour to Jack Nicholson; and Best Supporting Actress for Richard Jewell (2019), as the mother of a wrongly accused security guard. Four Oscar nominations across 29 years, one win, is a record of sustained quality that few actors match. It also explains the salary floor she enjoyed: an Oscar winner with three further nominations does not work cheap.

Her television rise ran in parallel. The Emmy nominations piled up — fourteen in total before Matlock, with wins for Two and a Half Men in 2012 and American Horror Story: Coven in 2014 — and each nomination lifted her television quote. By the time CBS came calling with Matlock, Bates was a two-time Emmy winner, a one-time Oscar winner and a performer whose name on a cast list signalled quality to audiences and advertisers alike. That is the position from which she negotiated her late-career payday.

Main Sources of Income

Bates’s money comes from five streams, and the balance between them has shifted with each decade of her career. Film salaries dominated the 1990s, when she worked steadily in studio features. Television salaries took over from the 2010s onward, as series work paid more per year than film supporting parts. Directing fees, residuals and producing fees fill out the picture.

Film salaries. Bates has appeared in more than 120 film and television projects. Her 1990s studio fees are not public — actors of her tier did not disclose salaries then, and no filing covers them — but the pattern is clear from the work: lead roles in mid-budget studio films (Misery, Fried Green Tomatoes, Dolores Claiborne), supporting roles in blockbusters (Titanic, The Blind Side, The Waterboy), and prestige parts in awards films (Primary Colors, About Schmidt, Richard Jewell). A supporting player of her standing in a 1990s studio film typically earned high six figures to low seven figures per picture, and she made several such pictures per decade. The films themselves earned real money: Titanic over $2.2 billion worldwide, The Blind Side about $309 million, The Waterboy about $186 million, Fried Green Tomatoes $119.4 million, About Schmidt $105.8 million, Revolutionary Road about $76 million, Misery $61.3 million and Primary Colors $52 million. Bates did not share in those grosses — she was a salaried actor, not a profit participant on the record — but the grosses kept her in demand, and demand is what sets the next salary.

Television salaries. This is now the largest stream. Bates has been a series regular or recurring player on network and cable television for much of the last fifteen years: Harry’s Law, American Horror Story, Disjointed and now Matlock. Series-regular pay for an actor of her stature runs well above guest-star rates, and Matlock pays her as both star and executive producer. The widely reported figure of $175,000 per episode is discussed in detail in the salary section below.

Executive-producer fees. Bates is credited as an executive producer on Matlock across 35 episodes through 2026, according to Metacritic’s credits listing. A producing credit on a network series carries a fee on top of the acting salary, plus a share of the show’s backend if it is sold into syndication or streaming. Matlock streams on Paramount+ and has been a ratings success for CBS, which makes the producing credit more than a vanity title: it is a second paycheque for the same job.

Directing fees. Bates directed episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, Oz and Six Feet Under. Prestige cable and network directing fees in that era ran into five figures per episode, and the work also paid residuals. Directing stopped being a regular income stream in the 2010s as her acting schedule filled, but the fees from those years are part of the fortune.

Residuals and royalties. Fifty years of work in film and television generates a long tail of residual payments: reruns of Harry’s Law, streaming of American Horror Story and Titanic, syndication of her guest appearances, and home-video and streaming licensing of her films. Residuals for a working character actor are modest per payment but they arrive for decades, and for Bates they now arrive from one of the largest catalogues of any living actor. She has no reported endorsement income of note and no business empire, which is why her net worth, while substantial, stays in the $20 million range rather than climbing toward the sums of actors who sell companies or front brands.

Salary and Earnings

The most-quoted number attached to Kathy Bates’s pay is $175,000 per episode. It appears across net-worth sites — Stover PT, Crix11 and eCelebritySpy all repeat it — and it is the figure most searchers want answered. Here is the honest position: no contract, filing, trade report or interview has ever confirmed it. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, the two outlets that routinely publish star salaries, have never printed a per-episode figure for Bates. The $175,000 number circulates only among net-worth aggregators, which copy each other. Treat it as reported, not verified, and treat anything built on it as arithmetic, not fact.

That said, the arithmetic is instructive. Matlock‘s first season ran 18 episodes. Metacritic credits Bates as an executive producer on 35 episodes across 2024–2026, covering seasons one and two. If the reported $175,000 per episode held across all 35 episodes, the acting salary alone would come to about $6.1 million before tax, agent commission (typically 10 percent) and manager fees — and that excludes her separate executive-producer fee. Even if the true figure is lower, the order of magnitude is right: a network lead of her standing, carrying a show that averaged 17 million viewers within 35 days of each first-season episode according to CBS figures cited by Celebrity Net Worth, earns well into seven figures per season. Matlock is the best-paying job of her career, arriving at 76, which is the single most unusual fact in her financial story.

Her earlier television pay is harder to pin down. Harry’s Law (2011–12) paid her as a network series lead, but NBC never disclosed the figure. American Horror Story paid her as a featured ensemble player across five seasons. One content farm, branded.tiny.cc, claims she earned $750,000 per episode on American Horror Story — a figure that appears nowhere in reputable reporting and would have made her one of the highest-paid television actors in history. It is not credible. Her actual Emmy win for Coven came in 2014, and no trade outlet has ever tied a per-episode number to her American Horror Story work. The $750,000 claim is the kind of invented number this article exists to correct, and it sits alongside the same site’s invented $60 million net worth figure.

Film pay followed the same pattern: solid, never spectacular. Bates was a salaried supporting player, not a backend participant, on the record. Her largest single-film paycheques likely came in the late 1990s, after Titanic, when her quote peaked — but no figure has ever been published, and this article will not invent one. What the record does show is volume: more than 120 credits, no long gaps, and a quote that rose with each Oscar nomination. An actor who works every year for fifty years, at a rising rate, does not need a single huge payday to reach $20 million. She needs exactly the career Bates had.

One more salary fact is worth stating plainly. Bates has said in interviews that she made financial decisions based on doing the right work, not chasing money — and the Matlock story proves it in reverse. She told The New York Times in September 2024 that a bad experience on an unnamed film had left her ready to retire, that she had called her agents to say she was done, and that the Matlock script changed her mind. “Everything I’ve prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it,” she said. “And it’s exhausting… This is my last dance.” She later clarified that she wanted to keep working on the show. The money followed the work, not the other way round.

Businesses and Investments

Bates has no business empire, and that is a deliberate part of her financial profile. She has never launched a production company, a beauty line, a tequila brand or a lifestyle business. She has never sold a company. Her wealth is almost entirely earned income from acting and directing, saved and invested over fifty years, rather than equity wealth. That distinction explains the gap between her $20 million and the nine-figure fortunes of peers who monetised fame outside acting.

One low-quality site, demo.theurbanist.org, claims Bates founded Amblin Entertainment Television and produced American Crime Story and Feud. That is false. Amblin is Steven Spielberg’s company, and Bates has no producing credit on either series. The claim is a reminder of how much invented business biography circulates around celebrities, and why this article checks every business claim against a credit or a filing. Bates’s real producing credit is Matlock, where she is an executive producer alongside showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman and Eric Christian Olsen, among others.

Her investments are private. No filing, interview or rich-list entry describes a stock portfolio, a property portfolio or a startup stake, and this article will not guess at one. What can be said is that a fifty-year career at her pay level, lived without the lavish spending habits that sink many actors, compounds into a substantial sum even at modest returns. Bates has lived quietly, kept one marriage and no public spending sprees, and worked continuously. The fortune is the arithmetic of longevity, not a single deal.

The one investment-like asset in her story is her catalogue itself. Residuals from Titanic, American Horror Story, Harry’s Law and her film library pay her every year, and the value of that catalogue rises each time a streamer licenses her work. It is not a business she owns, but it behaves like one: a durable income stream built from work already done.

Brand Deals and Sponsorships

Bates has no significant endorsement career, and that absence is itself a data point. She has never been the face of a fashion house, a car brand or a beauty line. She has done no reported paid social-media promotion — she has no verified personal social-media accounts to promote from. Her public appearances are tied to her work: awards shows, Matlock promotion, and advocacy for lymphedema awareness and cancer survivorship, none of which are paid endorsements.

The reason is straightforward. Bates’s brand is seriousness: an Oscar-winning actor whose name signals quality, not glamour. Advertisers who pay for celebrity endorsement usually buy youth, fashion or lifestyle reach. Bates sells none of those. She sells craft, and craft does not move perfume. The trade-off is visible in her net worth: actors with similar talent but heavy endorsement income — a fragrance deal here, a watch campaign there — can add millions a year that Bates never collected. She chose the work instead, and the $20 million figure reflects that choice honestly.

Her one public-facing role outside acting is health advocacy. After surviving ovarian cancer in 2003 and breast cancer in 2012, followed by a double mastectomy, Bates has spoken openly about lymphedema, the chronic swelling condition that followed her surgeries, and has worked with the Lymphatic Education & Research Network. That work is charitable, not commercial, and it is the closest thing she has to a public brand beyond acting itself.

Houses, Cars and Other Assets

Bates has long been based in Los Angeles, and that is about as much as the public record can say with confidence about her property. No verified deed, listing or interview pins down her home’s address or value. One net-worth site, Crix11, values a Hancock Park home at $2.9 million, but it cites no deed, no listing and no address, and no other outlet repeats the figure. This article records the claim and its weakness rather than repeating it as fact: a single low-authority site, no supporting record, is not enough to put a property value in a net-worth estimate.

What is known is that she has lived in Los Angeles for decades, close to the studios and networks that employ her, and that she has never been the subject of a celebrity real-estate story — no splashy purchase, no record-breaking sale, no Architectural Digest tour. For an actor of her tenure, that silence is itself informative: her housing has been a home, not an investment strategy or a publicity vehicle. She owns no reported car collection and no publicised art collection. Her assets, as far as the record shows, are a home, savings, investments and the residual stream from fifty years of work.

That modesty is the point. The $20 million estimate does not rest on property. It rests on earnings. Bates is not a real-estate investor who happens to act. She is an actor who saved her earnings, and the absence of a property portfolio in the public record is consistent with a fortune built from paycheques rather than deals.

Awards and Achievements

Bates’s trophy record is one of the strongest of any living American actor, and it is the foundation of her earning power. The headline numbers: one Academy Award from four nominations, two Primetime Emmy Awards from fourteen nominations before Matlock — her fifteenth Emmy nomination came for Matlock‘s first season — two Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, one Tony Award nomination, two BAFTA nominations and an Obie Award.

The Oscar win came in 1991 for Misery (1990 film year), Best Actress, with a Golden Globe in the same role. She remains the first woman to win the Best Actress Oscar for a horror film, a record that still stands. The three supporting-actress nominations followed: Primary Colors (1998), About Schmidt (2002) and Richard Jewell (2019). A span of 29 years between first and most recent Oscar nominations is rare, and it tells casting directors everything they need to know about reliability.

The Tony nomination came in 1983 for ‘night, Mother, and the Obie in 1988 for Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Together with the Oscar and the Emmys, those nominations make Bates one of the few performers ever nominated for the so-called Triple Crown of Acting — Tony, Oscar and Emmy — a distinction Screen Dollars highlights in her profile. She has won the Oscar and two Emmys; the Tony remains the missing piece.

Her Emmy wins came in 2012, as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy for Two and a Half Men, and in 2014, as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie for American Horror Story: Coven. The second win matters most to her pay: it proved she could anchor a cable hit in her sixties, and it set up the American Horror Story run that kept her on television for the next decade. Matlock added a Critics Choice Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series in 2025 and her fifteenth Emmy nomination.

Peer comparison puts the record in context. Shirley MacLaine’s net worth sits near $50 million on a similarly long career with an Oscar win, while Emma Stone’s net worth reflects a younger star with two Best Actress Oscars and franchise paydays Bates never had. Jamie Lee Curtis’s net worth, around $60 million per Celebrity Net Worth, shows what a horror-icon career plus a late-career Oscar can build — Curtis, like Bates, turned a genre breakthrough into a five-decade career, and the two remain the most useful comparison for each other. Bates’s fortune is smaller than theirs, and the reason is simple: she never had a franchise lead or a company sale. She had the awards, the work and the longevity, and $20 million is what that combination is worth.

Net Worth Growth Over the Years

No annual net-worth figures for Bates were ever published in real time, so the table below is a reconstruction: career milestones and the public estimates of each era, assembled to show the shape of the fortune rather than a precise ledger. It is labelled as such because the alternative — presenting invented yearly figures as fact — is exactly the practice this site exists to avoid.

The shape is a slow, steady climb — no spike, no crash. That is the signature of a salaried career. The one anomaly in the public record is the $32 million figure that still circulates on some sites. It traces to a 2019 snapshot of her Wikipedia infobox, which briefly listed “US$32 million (2019)” as her net worth. That figure was never sourced to a rich list or a filing, it was later removed, and no current tracker repeats it — except the sites that copied the old snapshot and never updated it. eCelebritySpy still carries $32 million, dated to a 2021 update of a 2020 article. The current consensus, updated in October 2026 by Celebrity Net Worth, The Tab, Screen Dollars and Limerick Time, is $20 million, with Crix11 alone at $22 million.

The other outliers are easier to dismiss. One site claims $60 million and a $750,000-per-episode American Horror Story salary; another claims $40 million; a third claims $30 million. None of them names a source, a filing or an interview. All of them contradict the four most recent, most careful trackers. The honest range is $20 million to $22 million, anchored at $20 million, and the $60 million and $40 million figures belong in the same category as the invented Amblin claim: content-farm fiction.

Matlock is the only recent event that could push the figure up. A third season has been ordered for 2027, and if Bates’s reported per-episode figure holds, another season adds seven figures to her earnings. But a net-worth estimate counts money already earned, not money a future season might pay. Until season three airs and the cheques clear, $20 million to $22 million is the right range.

Social Media Presence

Kathy Bates has no verified personal social-media accounts. She is not on Instagram, X or TikTok under her own name, and she has never run a public account to promote her work. Fan accounts exist on every platform, some with large followings, but none of them is her, and none of them earns her money. In an era when actors monetise their followings directly, Bates is an outlier: her public presence runs through her work and through the official accounts of the shows she appears in.

That absence has a financial consequence. A verified Instagram account with millions of followers can earn a celebrity six figures per sponsored post. Bates collects none of that. It also has a professional consequence: her casting depends entirely on reputation and recent work, not on follower counts. Matlock‘s success proved that the old model still works — CBS promoted the show through its own channels, and audiences found it through the network, not through an actor’s feed.

Searchers should treat any account claiming to be Kathy Bates with care. She has spoken in interviews about keeping her private life private, and her representatives have never announced a personal account. The reliable way to follow her work is through CBS and Paramount+ announcements for Matlock, and through FX for American Horror Story.

Personal Life

Bates was married once, to actor Tony Campisi, from 1991 to 1997. The marriage ended in divorce, and she has no children. She has kept her private life largely out of the press since, and she rarely discusses relationships in interviews. Her public personal story is instead a health story, and she has told it on her own terms.

In 2003, Bates was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She underwent surgery and chemotherapy and recovered, but she kept the diagnosis private for years, disclosing it only later. In 2012, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. The surgeries led to lymphedema, a chronic condition in which lymph fluid collects in the arms, causing swelling and pain. Bates has spoken openly about lymphedema since, becoming one of the most prominent public advocates for the condition and working with the Lymphatic Education & Research Network to raise awareness. She has described the condition as a daily management task — compression garments, physical therapy, care with infections — and her openness has helped other patients recognise their own symptoms earlier.

Her weight loss has drawn its own headlines. By 2024, Bates had lost about 100 pounds, a change visible across the first season of Matlock. She has said the loss came from a combination of Ozempic and sustained lifestyle changes, and she has spoken about it frankly rather than presenting it as a mystery. The change is a health story, not a wealth story, but it matters to her career: she has said the weight loss improved her energy and stamina, which matters when you are carrying a network drama at 78.

She lives in Los Angeles, close to the work, and she is 78 years old as of November 2026. Her family — her sisters, and the memory of her parents in Memphis — stays out of the press. The personal life that the public can verify is a simple one: a working actor, a cancer survivor twice over, a lymphedema advocate, and a woman who, after half a century in the business, still shows up on set every day.

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Published on November 14, 2026. Last reviewed November 2026. Found an error? See our corrections policy.