Kathy Bates Husband: Inside Her Marriage To Tony Campisi And Life After

When people search for “Kathy Bates husband,” they’re really asking about one man: Tony Campisi. He was her long-time partner, the fellow actor she married just as Misery turned her into a star, and the person she quietly divorced a few years later. Today, Kathy Bates is single, but that relationship is still the one that comes up whenever anyone talks about her love life.

Kathy Bates In The Spotlight

Kathy Bates has had the kind of career most actors dream about. Born in Memphis in 1948, she worked her way up through theater and smaller film roles before everything changed with one part: Annie Wilkes in Misery. Her performance was so intense and unforgettable that it won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1991 and instantly put her on Hollywood’s A-list.

From there, she never really slowed down. She brought warmth to Fried Green Tomatoes, terror to Dolores Claiborne, popped up in Titanic, stole scenes in About Schmidt, and kept finding surprising supporting roles in films like The Blind Side. On TV, she’s shown up everywhere from Six Feet Under to Two and a Half Men to American Horror Story, winning Emmys along the way.

Now, well into her seventies, she’s front and center again, leading the CBS reboot of Matlock and earning yet more glowing reviews. Professionally, we know almost everything. Personally, she’s always kept the door just a bit more closed.

How Kathy Bates Met Tony Campisi

Long before Annie Wilkes ever met a sledgehammer, Kathy Bates had already met the man who would become her husband. She and Tony Campisi crossed paths in 1977 while working in theater. Both were actors, both were hustling for parts, and they clicked.

Campisi was a character actor, the kind of performer whose face you recognize even if you’re not sure from where. Over the years he turned up in shows like Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU, in Law & Order: Criminal Intent and even in Spider-Man 2, along with a lot of less glamorous stage and TV work.

Bates and Campisi spent almost 14 years together before they ever bothered to get married. They lived together, supported each other’s careers, and quietly built a life around two people trying to make it as working actors. By the time the rest of the world started paying serious attention to her, he had already been part of her story for a long time.

Marriage At The Peak Of Fame

In 1991, everything happened at once. Bates won an Oscar for Misery and, that same year, she and Tony Campisi finally made it official and got married.

It sounds like a movie ending—after years together, she gets both the gold statue and the ring—but in reality it marked the beginning of a very intense period. Her career shifted into high gear after Misery. Suddenly there were more scripts, more interviews, more travel, and a lot more pressure to capitalize on that success.

Campisi later hinted that her fame and workload changed the rhythm of their relationship. Some profiles quote him saying that her career “shifted everything into a new gear,” which is a gentle way of acknowledging that the balance between them wasn’t quite the same anymore.

They still tried to move through it as a team—two actors juggling jobs and time apart—but it’s not hard to imagine how complicated that became when one partner was suddenly in global demand.

The End Of The Marriage

Although their relationship lasted close to two decades in total, the legal marriage itself was short by comparison. Kathy Bates and Tony Campisi divorced in 1997, after about six years as husband and wife.

Their breakup wasn’t a tabloid circus. There were no huge public fights or dramatic court transcripts splashed across covers. Later write-ups describe the split in fairly understated terms: different priorities, the strain of demanding careers, and two people simply drifting apart after many years.

One bit of misinformation that still floats around online is that they had children together. They didn’t. Reliable sources agree that Bates and Campisi never had kids, and Bates herself has spoken in interviews about not becoming a mother and how she poured a lot of her “nurturing” energy into her roles and relationships with friends instead.

After the divorce, they went their separate ways—no public feud, no public reunion, just two lives that once overlapped and then didn’t.

Tony Campisi In His Own Right

Because Kathy Bates is so famous, it’s easy to reduce Tony Campisi to a footnote. But he had his own career and identity before, during and after their time together.

Born in Houston in 1943, he initially studied music before shifting into acting. His résumé reads like that of many working actors: theater projects that meant a lot to the people who saw them, guest spots on shows like Law & Order, and small film roles that most viewers wouldn’t necessarily connect back to a name but would definitely recognize on screen.

Later articles understandably lean on the line “formerly married to Kathy Bates,” because that’s what curious readers latch onto. But inside the industry, he was simply one more actor doing the job, often in the background while bigger names took the marquee.

Did Kathy Bates Ever Remarry?

Once people learn about Tony Campisi, the next question is almost always, “So… did she marry again?”

As far as solid reporting goes, the answer is no. Since her 1997 divorce, Kathy Bates has not remarried. Recent profiles, award-season coverage and interviews describe her as divorced and single, with no second husband quietly waiting in the wings.

That hasn’t stopped some low-quality sites from inventing mysterious partners or hinting at secret marriages, usually without citing anything concrete. Those stories don’t line up with more reliable biographies and tend to contradict basic facts. Reputable outlets consistently show one marriage—Tony Campisi, 1991 to 1997—and no confirmed long-term romantic partner since.

What she has shared freely is a different kind of personal story: her health.

Health, Work, And A Conscious Kind Of Privacy

Kathy Bates has been admirably open about her medical history. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2003 and later with breast cancer in 2012, undergoing a double mastectomy. As a result, she developed lymphedema in both arms and has since become a vocal advocate for research, support and awareness around the condition.

She’s talked honestly about depression, about learning to live in a different body, about changing her lifestyle and losing weight later in life. That level of candor stands in pretty stark contrast to how guarded she is about romance.

She’s joked that playing someone like Annie Wilkes didn’t exactly help her dating prospects and has mentioned feeling more open to companionship now that she’s older and healthier. But she hasn’t introduced anyone to the world as a new partner, and there’s a sense that she prefers it that way: the work and the health battles are public; her love life, after Tony Campisi, is hers.