“They just cheated us. This isn’t fair. He didn’t get out of the cockadoodie car!” In 1990, Kathy Bates animated Annie Wilkes, one of the most iconic and troubling characters to erupt from Stephen King’s imagination. Whether she was telling her captive, Paul Sheldon (James Caan), about her obsessive love of his work or hobbling him so he can’t escape, Annie kept viewers on the edge of their seats wondering what lunacy she’d further devolve into. While Bates’ role as Annie Wilkes was a triumph, winning her the Academy Award, she starred as another complex woman in a film adapted from a Stephen King novel: the titular Dolores Claiborne.
