Celebrated actress, astonishing comedic talent and Canadian national treasure Catherine O’Hara died today in Los Angeles. She was 71 years old.
O’Hara was born and raised in Toronto, the sixth of seven children. When Catherine was in high school, her older brother started dating Gilda Radner, who inspired O’Hara, at 17, to audition for a musical. While she didn’t get the part, she hung out with the people who did — and that’s how she met future onscreen husband Eugene Levy, and future lifelong friend Martin Short. Short once told Vanity Fair, “Everyone has been in love with Catherine since she was 17. No one made me laugh like her onstage.”
O’Hara started her career as a cast member at The Second City, as Radner’s understudy. She was slated to join “Saturday Night Live” as a regular in 1981, but quit before making her debut, instead opting to join her theater troupe comrades on the cult hit “SCTV.”
The world is less funny without Catherine O’Hara in it. That’s not hyperbole.
Being a woman in comedy in the late 1970s was not an easy road. O’Hara once told Vulture that when she was with Second City, she’d whisper her ideas to a male castmate so that he could pitch them, and that there were never more than two women onstage at once — a “product of the times.” She wasn’t paid as a writer during the first season of “SCTV,” the show for which she’d later win an Emmy.
O’Hara’s hits-to-misses ratio was insane. She voiced the role of Sally in “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” She was Kate McCallister in “Home Alone” and “Home Alone 2.” Moira Rose in “Schitt’s Creek.” Patty Leigh in “The Studio.” Delia Deetz in “Beetlejuice.” Cookie Fleck in “Best in Show.” Sheila Albertson in “Waiting for Guffman.” She voiced a handful of characters in “Frankenweenie.” And on. And on. She was even in “The Last of Us,” for God’s sake.
The world is less funny without Catherine O’Hara in it. That’s not hyperbole. Conan O’Brien called her “the funniest woman in the world” on the liner notes of the “SCTV” DVD. But before “Schitt’s Creek” finally gave her the chance to let her zany genius unfold across 80 episodes from 2015 to 2020, she wasn’t a household name. But that was by design. O’Hara once quipped that she’d rather work rarely due to her own pickiness than try for every role and get rejected all the time.
But when she did take a role, she committed so hard that it was impossible to picture anybody else playing it.
O’Hara was consistently the most magnetic person in any scene she blessed with her presence. But she didn’t steal the show — she elevated it. Everybody around her would rise to her standard. She was a generous performer. She would lift her co-stars up and they would lift her up in artistic symbiosis. She was there for the ceremony when her “Home Alone” co-star Macaulay Culkin was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, decades after the two had worked together. When asked about her “Temple Grandin” co-star Claire Danes, O’Hara gushed about how talented she was.
O’Hara was capable of presenting new, entirely ridiculous archetypes with audacious self-assurance. Cookie Fleck, a terrier breeder with a salacious past that routinely scandalizes her nebbishy husband Gordon (played by frequent screen partner Eugene Levy)? Sure!
How about Moira Rose, a fading actress with an unplaceable disappearing accent, absurdly vain, probably alcoholic, placed in a series of humiliating situations but refusing to be humbled? And she has a wall of wigs? I’m in. There was no event horizon of absurdity in O’Hara’s body of talent. She could always take it further, and she could always take audiences with her.
Nobody could work themselves into a comedic frenzy like O’Hara. As the neurotic “Beetlejuice” foil Delia Deetz, she delivers one of her trademark crash outs. Frustrated by her husband’s hesitation to let her remodel her charming country home into a den of bad art, Delia builds from a bark to a scream: “If you don’t let me gut out this house and make it my own, I will go insane and I will take you with me!” O’Hara delivered this line with hysterical sincerity. As a viewer, you feel sorry for Delia, but are also a little bit afraid of her, but are also laughing so hard that you have to rewind the scene and watch the whole buildup to that spectacular unraveling again.
Nobody could work themselves into a comedic frenzy like O’Hara.
O’Hara’s ability to push things to a frenzy made her moments of restraint even funnier. During the first episode of AppleTV’s “The Studio,” Matt Remick (Seth Rogan) drives to the home of O’Hara’s character Patty Leigh, the fired studio exec he replaced. He knocks. The door opens slowly. Patty looks absolutely terrible — hair sticking in all directions, face streaked with makeup, in a dirty-looking sweatsuit. Calmly, exerting all of her energy to appear to be in control, she says, “How dare you show your face at my door? You of all people.” Patty keeps it together for a few seconds before she melts down. Matt is overwhelmed by her display of emotion and afraid of her instability, trying to be the “good guy” but unsure of how to proceed — Rogan’s comedic sweet spot. Two talents at their absolute best. Belly laughter.
What a loss to fans of laughter that there will be no more Catherine O’Hara films or TV shows.
What a loss to actors and collaborators that there will be no more zany weirdos that only she could have come up with.
What a loss to her family — her husband and two adult sons.
What a loss to the city of Brentwood, where she served as honorary mayor in 2021, the year after she received her Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. The news release accompanying the announcement noted her family’s “kindness, humility and neighborliness.” Humility! In Brentwood!
O’Hara was only 71 years old. She was at her absolute peak. A peak that started the second she joined Second City, a peak that lasted until the end of her life. Hers was a life well-lived. And her transcendent comedic career left a body of work so deep, wide and beloved that it can’t possibly be soon forgotten.
