Kathy Bates recalls hitting the bar with Meryl Streep after losing Oscar to Catherine Zeta-Jones

Losing an Oscar always causes misery and doubt — even if you've won one or two already.

Kathy Bates recalled numbing the pain of Oscar defeat alongside one of her longtime rivals, Meryl Streep, during her appearance on Dinner's on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson. "We were both nominated the year that Catherine Zeta-Jones won," Bates said of the 2003 Academy Awards, where she was nominated for About Schmidt and Streep was nominated for Adaptation. "We were both for Supporting [Actress]."

Zeta-Jones won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Chicago early in the evening, so Streep and Bates both had a long show to endure after their losses were announced. "[Meryl] sailed by during the commercial break, said, 'Come on, we're going to the bar,'" Bates remembered. "So we went to the bar. It was a very Joan Crawford, Bette Davis moment."

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After over a decade of admiration and envy, Bates was relieved to share a sweet moment with Streep, who had previously won Oscars for Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie's Choice. "She slammed her evening bag down on the bar and said, 'I'm having a vodka, straight, neat,' or whatever, and I slammed my evening bag down," Bates remembered. "I said, 'I'm having what she's having.'"

Bates continued, "We tossed it. It was a moment. It really was a moment when I could see we turned and toasted each other and I could see in her eyes, and I'm sure she could see in mine, how we wanted it so badly, you know? That we thought, 'Oh, we're so close.' But I've just admired her so much in the trajectory that her career has had and the amazing roles that she's done."

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Earlier in her conversation with host Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Bates discussed her complicated feelings toward the Mamma Mia! star early in her career. "I wasn't the same as Meryl Streep — I wasn't as brilliant as she was in order to be able to do the amazing roles she did and the transformations that she made," she said. "When you start out and you have those opportunities, each one is so different and so difficult that you build your strength."

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Bates had one role in 1995 that she thought rivaled Streep's transformations. "I always think of Dolores Claiborne as my Meryl Streep role when I was really able to do that," she said. "And I think if I had had more of those, I would have developed into a better actress than I am now."

The actress eventually realized that she and Streep weren't exactly the same kind of performer capable of playing the same types of roles. "Think about this train scene in Sophie's Choice, where she is acting in an incredibly emotional scene with these two children — in Polish, thank you very much," Bates said. "I could never do it. I could never attempt doing it. So when I see performances like that or when she played Margaret Thatcher and it was a complete transformation, and I watched this, I'm thrilled by it. And I'm envious of it."

Bates — whose performance in Misery edged out Streep's turn in Postcards from the Edge for the Best Actress trophy at the 1991 Oscars — said that she eventually overcame her complicated feelings toward her peer when she had a dream about her.

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"I remember in this dream, I was in a tub, empty, but I was in it, and I was for some reason wearing Jackie's dress from the [Kennedy] assassination, the suit," she recalled. "And Meryl was outside the tub, and I was looking up at her, and I had had a stroke, and I said, 'You win.' Because I think up until that moment, I was comparing myself to her, and then when I realized, 'No way, Jose, could I have done these roles.'"

Listen to Bates' full conversation with Ferguson above.

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