The narrative of a lady whose body became public property long before she ever signed a release form is one type of story that the American tabloid press loves and seldom does well. That woman was Darlene Cates. In late 1993, she made her on screen debut. She wasn’t found through agent calls or auditions, but rather through a daytime chat show program headlined, very bluntly, “Too Heavy to Leave Their House.” Her weight, her operations, her numbers, and ultimately her death were the subject of a thirty year online and print dialogue that she never fully controlled but also never quite gave up.
The story of Darlene Cates’ weight loss, which was extensively covered by American and British media in 2012, started with a medical emergency that almost killed her in December 2010 rather than a diet plan. That month, she was sent to the hospital, where she stayed for over a year, with only short breaks, until November 2011. She had four surgeries during that time, and she nearly died three times. It’s worth taking a time to consider it. Four operations. Three close calls with death. She spent a year away from her husband Robert, her children, her grandchildren, and her Forney, Texas, home. Depending on the initial weight, the weight loss that ensued between 240 and 250 pounds was not the triumphant finish of a wellness program. It was what made it through an emergency.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Rita Darlene Guthrie Cates |
| Born | December 13, 1947 — Borger, Texas, USA |
| Died | March 26, 2017 — Forney, Texas, USA (age 69) |
| Spouse | Robert Cates (married c. 1963; 54 years) |
| Children | Sheri Ann Cates Morgan, Mark Cates, Chris Cates |
| Known For | Bonnie Grape in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) |
| Weight Lost | ~240–250 lbs (109–113 kg) by August 2012 |
| Bariatric Surgery | Gastroplasty (1981); multiple surgeries (2010–2011) |
| Weight Loss Programme | TOPS (Take Pounds Off Sensibly) |
| Final Film | Billboard (released 2019, posthumously) |
This was a road she had already tried. She had a gastroplasty in 1981 when she weighed about 410 pounds. At the time, stomach staples were frequently used to treat morbidly obese patients. She shed about a hundred pounds. Then the weight returned, as she would say to People magazine in 2004 in what would go on to become her most famous quote: “That thing that got you obese in the first place? During surgery, they don’t remove that. When you return home from the hospital, the pressures that led you to turn to food for comfort still exist.” It’s the kind of comment that, once spoken clearly, seems apparent but, for some reason, still requires expression. Years before conventional medicine realized that treating obesity without behavioral and psychological support tends to fail over time, she was stating this.
She was over 500 pounds and mostly confined to her home when Lasse Hallström’s casting team saw her on Sally Jessy Raphael in January 1992. After watching the footage, author Peter Hedges, whose book What’s Eating Gilbert Grape was being adapted for the big screen, thought he had discovered Bonnie Grape, a once beautiful Iowa housewife who had simply ceased leaving the house following her husband’s suicide. More than just a physique was needed for the part. It required humor, self irony, and a tenderness that could withstand the audience’s sympathy. Every significant obituary that followed quoted Hallström as “this wonderful personality in the disguise of her own body.” DiCaprio received positive reviews for the movie and was nominated for his first Academy Award. Cates was quietly remarkable as she played the impossible role of the mother, having never acted before.
In August 2012, the British media was captivated by Darlene Cates’ weight loss tale, which featured spectacular weight counts, before and after photos, and a redeeming statement. Within days of the Dallas Morning News releasing its lengthy interview with her, the story appeared in the Daily Mail, Metro, Digital Spy, and HuffPost UK. Her age was sixty four. She was using a wheelchair. She had dropped from a self reported top weight of 575 pounds to 331 pounds. She expressed her desire to return to acting and shed an additional hundred pounds to the newspaper. “I refuse to be the fat woman joke in any movie” , she stated, “and I’ve turned down roles where they wanted me to be.”
Looking back, the relative constraint of that 2012 coverage was what made it intriguing. Instead of engaging in actual cruelty, The Mirror reproduced her own statements about cruelty. She was portrayed by Metro as an actress attempting to resume her career. Maybe someone realized that this wasn’t a vanity endeavor. This woman was recovering through TOPS Take Pounds Off Sensibly, a non profit peer support group that met in church halls instead of on prime time television. She had spent a year in the hospital and had lost two friends to complications from weight loss surgery in the years prior to her own crisis. The manner and the pace were almost blatantly unglamorous. The contrast between that reality and the dramatic headlines it produced is difficult to ignore.
On March 26, 2017, she passed away in her sleep at home at the age of sixty nine. No cause was disclosed to the public. In a Facebook post announcing the death, her daughter Sheri Ann said that dancing was something Darlene had enjoyed “back in the day” and had mentioned going back to. Billboard*, a tiny comedy she had finished before passing away, was released posthumously in 2019. She was not the joke, and she had fulfilled her promise to return to acting in a respected job.
After decades of struggle that began in a small Texas town when she was twelve years old and her parents divorced, Darlene Cates lost 575 pounds to 331 pounds over the course of eighteen months of recovery. The math behind her weight loss narrative is real. The math was never the complete picture. The quieter version may have been overlooked by the press in its haste for statistics: a woman who knew her own body better than the majority of her doctors, who recognized the emotional architecture of her overeating long before the clinical literature caught up, who turned down the punchline role for fifty four years of marriage and one remarkable screen performance, and who passed away peacefully at home after expressing most of what she had ever wanted to say in her own voice.
i) https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/darlene-cates-actress-from-whats-eating-gilbert-grape-dies-at-69/2017/03/30/7c38d6a2-1547-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html
ii) https://obits.al.com/us/obituaries/birmingham/name/darlene-cates-obituary?pid=184734468
iii) https://uinterview.com/news/darlene-cates-whats-eating-gilbert-grape-star-dies-69/
iv) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/darlene-cates-actress-who-played-mother-in-whats-eating-gilbert-grape-is-dead-at-69/