Celebrity Biographies
Darlene Cates
Movie buffs will remember the morbidly obese mother of Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio in the emotional drama “Who Does Gilbert Grape Love?” The actress who brought her character to life, Darlene Cates, passed away on March 26, 2017 at the age of 69 at her home in Forney, Texas. “It comforts us to know that she is no longer in pain and is in the arms of our Father God,” Sheri Cates Morgan, her daughter, explains in a statement.
Born on December 13, 1947, Rita Darlene Guthrie –her real name– did not have any experience as an actress –she worked as a housewife–, when the screenwriter Peter Hedges discovered her in 1992 on a television program, “Sally”, where she spoke of her fight against her weight problems. She thought she was the right person to play the matriarch in the film she was writing, Who Does Gilbert Grape Love? , which Lasse Hallström ended up directing . She accepted at a time when she weighed 225 kilos.
The work of Darlene Cates , in striking images of her character, prostrate not moving from her chair, and whose offspring cannot get out of the house when she dies, received mostly critical acclaim. “She perfectly performs an impossible role,” opined Janet Maslin, in The New York Times . “Credible and emphatic, it does the film a great favor.”
After the success of the film, she returned to work as an actress in the series Picket Fences , and Touched by an Angel , and the telefilm Wolf Girl: The Wolf Woman . She leaves the comedy Billboard , starring Eric Roberts , pending release, still in post-production.