Kathy Bates was ready to quit. A movie shoot had soured (no, she won’t specify the movie) and she found herself alone, on her sofa in Los Angeles, sobbing. Bates, who won an Oscar for “Misery” and Emmys for “American Horror Story” and “Two and a Half Men,” has always taken her work to heart in an all-consuming way.

“It becomes my life,” she said. “Sometimes I get jealous of having this talent. Because I can’t hold it back, and I just want my life.” She had given herself over to this part, and the gift had been ignored. The next day, she called her agents and told them she wanted to retire.

A few weeks later, in January of this year, her agents sent her a script. It was for a procedural, which she hadn’t been looking for, and it was a reboot of a series that hadn’t especially moved her the first time: “Matlock,” a drama about a folksy attorney with a virtuosic legal mind and a wardrobe of seersucker suits. It endures in the cultural memory mostly as a punchline about shows old people like to watch.

Still she began to read the script. And she kept reading. The protagonist, a woman who feels that age had rendered her invisible, was brilliant, canny, out for justice, and Bates has always had a strong sense of fairness. She feels the injustices of her career and her early life acutely, and the idea of playing a woman out to right wrongs called to her.

So she paused her retirement. And “Matlock,” which debuts on CBS on Sept. 22 and will stream on Paramount+, became the unlikely vessel into which Bates, 76, can pour her talent, her vigor and surprisingly, given the shallowness of a typical procedural, all of her pain.

“Everything I’ve prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it,” she said. “And it’s exhausting.”

This show, she said, will be her final one. “This is my last dance.”

IN LATE JULY, I met Bates for an early dinner at a Beverly Hills restaurant where she often takes meetings and knows the staff by name. I was early but she was earlier, ensconced on a patio banquette in sunglasses and a sun hat.

I was eager to speak to her. She seemed to be a woman who had played the Hollywood game and won it, without ever having to conform to the absurd ideals of what a woman onscreen should be. Her characters are mouthy, fractious, nonconforming. I anticipated some of that same outspokenness in person, a woman who would shoot from the hip over Pellegrino and fried artichokes.

“She’s very funny,” her friend and colleague Jessica Lange, who recently starred with Bates in “The Great Lillian Hall,” told me the day before. “She is very smart. She’s just great to be around. You’ll enjoy your dinner with her very much if she’s in a good mood.”

And if she’s not?

“Well, good luck to you.”

Bates was not in a good mood that evening. She was never ungracious, even scooching over when she noticed that the sun was in my eyes, but she seemed to see the meal as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. She was forthright, almost to a fault, but in place of the feistiness I’d expected, here instead was a woman who wore her wounds on the sleeves of her embroidered caftan. Though she is one of the most celebrated actors of her generation, she seems unable to enjoy her own achievements. She tends to ruminate instead on the difficulties, the slights, the dismissals, even as she judged herself for these complaints.

“Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain,” she said between courses. “Do I have the right to feel this pain? When I was given so much?”

There is a story Bates’s mother liked to tell that when Bates was born and the doctor slapped her bottom, Bates thought it was applause. This was in Memphis in 1948. Bates was the youngest of three girls — her sisters were much older — and felt unwanted, which she sees as a primal injury.

“As I got older, I realized that I wasn’t meant to be,” she said. “That has informed my evolution as a human being, and who you are as a human being, it’s who you are as an artist.”

But onstage, she felt prized, loved. After graduating from Southern Methodist University with a theater degree, she moved to New York. By the late 1970s, she was considered a leading light of Off Broadway. She tried Hollywood briefly in her mid 20s, without much success. In the late 1980s she was ready to try again.

“I never really thought about being a movie star,” she said. “I just wanted to be the best I could be.”

At first the move was demoralizing. She was often told she wasn’t pretty enough to succeed. Then in 1990, when she was 41, she landed the role of Annie Wilkes, a psychotic recluse who kidnaps a famous writer, in “Misery.” She gave herself over to the role, so much that Rob Reiner, the film’s director, had to tell her to leave Annie’s difficult emotions at the studio gates.

“I told her, ‘You’re such a great actor,’’” Reiner recalled. “‘You could leave it here and then come back to it.’ She’s an amazing actress. I just didn’t want to have her torture herself.”

Did Bates listen? “Probably not,” she said.

Annie Wilkes won Bates an Oscar. Another actor might remember such a pinnacle with pleasure, but looking back Bates only recalled missteps — the time her bra was visible underneath a top at an awards show, the time she forgot to cut the tags off a blouse, the time her corsetry went wrong.

“I never felt dressed right or well,” she said of the publicity rounds she made for the film and after. “I felt like a misfit. It’s that line in ‘Misery’ when Annie says, ‘I’m not a movie star.’ I’m not.”

As Bates sees it, Hollywood still didn’t know what to do with her. Annie, another misfit, had fit her like a glove; everything else hung awkwardly. She contemplated a return to theater, but she stuck it out in California. Eventually television came calling. She had arcs on “Six Feet Under” and “The Office” and a celebrated guest appearance on “Two and a Half Men.”

In 2011, Bates starred in “Harry’s Law,” a “Matlock”-adjacent NBC procedural about a plucky lawyer. It was quickly canceled. Soon after, Bates, having survived ovarian cancer in 2003, received a diagnosis of breast cancer. Again she survived, but some confidence went out of her, some self-regard. “I didn’t care about myself,” she said.

She found a new home in Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” anthology series, playing monsters of one kind or another across several seasons. And Chuck Lorre created a mellower show for her, “Disjointed,” in which she plays a woman who runs a medical marijuana dispensary.

The rewards of this unexpected third act did not improve her outlook. Bates often gravitates toward discontented women, women who struggle to be loved, accepted, seen. “Typecasting,” she said dryly. And she is dismissive of her fame. Its biggest upside? She is pretty sure that, if needed, she can jump the line for an operating table.

But acting itself has usually offered solace. “It was the only thing I’ve had, ever,” she said. For Bates, work offers both a reprieve from feelings of being unwanted and a place where those feelings can be put to use, fleshing out her characters.

Alan Ball, the creator of “Six Feet Under,” who also hired Bates to direct several episodes, described what made her so invaluable. “If I had to come up with one word to describe Kathy, it would be ‘real.’” he said. “She’s just real.”

And yet that realism doesn’t come easily. Rachel McAdams, her co-star in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” a recent triumph, noted her rigor and her pride in her craft.

“She’s always looking to improve,” McAdams said. “Even though her first take is blowing everyone away, there’s something inside of her going, ‘There’s so much further to go; let me show you what I can do.’”

That work ethic is exhausting, and in her mid 70s, Bates had earned a rest. And a network show with an 18-episode order is in no way restful.

Yet “Matlock” was undeniable to her. The original, which ran from 1986-95, starred Andy Griffith as Ben Matlock, a genial Atlanta attorney with a fondness for hot dogs and cross-examination. In reinventing the series, the showrunner, Jennie Snyder Urman, wanted to explore the ways in which older women can be underestimated and overlooked.

“There’s this funny thing that happens when women age,” Bates’s Madeline Matlock, nicknamed Matty, says in the pilot. “We become damn near invisible.” Then she adds, “It’s useful, because nobody sees us coming.”

Urman knew that Bates could offer both surface geniality and the hint of something sterner underneath.

“It’s like, underestimate at your own peril,” Urman said.

WHEN I MET BATES, she had shot 12 episodes of “Matlock” and was in the middle of the 13th. The schedule was indeed punishing, partly because as soon as she arrives home, she has to study the next day’s lines.

But her affinity for the role is deep. Matty uses her work as a conduit for personal grief, and Bates behaves similarly. “Maybe on some deep level that’s why I was attracted to this,” she said. And she sympathizes with Matty’s desire to rectify the wrongs of the past, to drive toward right.

Skye P. Marshall, who plays a lawyer in “Matlock,” sees the fight in Bates.

“When she gets a script and she reads through it, you will see her challenge the directors, challenge the writers in a very healthy way,” Marshall said. “She is an all-around beautiful warrior who is so intuitive, so intelligent and unwilling to tolerate any injustice for anyone.”

It is an irony, maybe a tragic one, that Bates can’t see herself this way, or at least not on the day we spoke. She tended to dilate on injury, not renewal; on mistakes, not triumphs. Near the end of our time together, she began to quietly weep.

“I have no right,” she said. “I see the state of the world, and here I am sitting in a posh restaurant in a posh town with a posh career, going home to a posh house, and what right do I have to cry?”

But she would cry. And then she would stop. There would be dessert, polite farewells, a ride home to her house, where she would study the next week’s pages. Because Bates was not quitting just yet. There would be new episodes, new scenes, new chances to do the work, to try this time to make it right.