Kathryn Jane Kates was born in New York City on January 29, 1948. Her father, Louis Kates, was an electronics engineer. Her mother, Sylvia Kates, was an actress who worked under the stage name Madelyn Cates. Kathryn Kates graduated from Great Neck North Senior High School in 1967. She graduated from Tisch School of the arts at New York University in 1971. Ms. Kates moved to Los Angeles in 1974 where she began her acting career.[3] She is one of 25 actors who are founding members of The Colony Theatre,[4] at The Studio Theatre in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. Kates, was co-general manager with Barbara Beckley of The Colony from 1975 to 1981. Kates and Beckley produced all of the company's plays during those years. Kathryn Kates played opposite John Larroquette as his mother, lover, and wife: as his mother in Enter Laughing (Cast Theatre, 1974); as his wife in A Company of Wayward Saints (Colony Theatre 1978);[5] and as his lover in The Lady's Not For Burning (Colony Theatre, 1979).[6] Kates also appeared in many of The Colony Theater's L.A. Drama Critics' Circle award-winning productions such as The Grapes of Wrath[7] and The Martian Chronicles.
Kates worked in film, for director Daryl Wein in Lola Versus, and for Paul Moshe Mones in Dovid Moyer as Odel, the Orthodox cook. She also worked with Don Siegel (in Jinxed!,[8]) and Lamont Johnson in the television movie Life of The Party: The Story of Beatrice (1982). She won the Drama Logue Award for best actress for her role as Ruby in Marsha Norman's Getting Out (1982), and in 2010 received a Best Supporting Actress nomination from the MITF in NYC for her work in Gray Matters as the high-powered agent, Miriam Berger (2010).[9]
After relocating to New York City in 2006, Kates appeared in over twenty off- and off-off-Broadway productions, and toured Europe (Bucharest, Sibiu and Stockholm) with Saviana Stanescu's Waxing West,[10] She was the Palestinian Aunt in the New York Theatre Workshop production of Food and Fadwa, on Theatre Row in Herman Kline's Midlife Crisis,[11] and, more recently starred along with Greg Mullavey and Gaby Hoffmann in The Last Seder. She was a company member of Daniel Talbott's Rising Phoenix Rep.[12]
