Catherine O'Hara poses on the red carpet before a TIFF screening of The Wild Robot in Toronto on Sept. 8, 2024. O'Hara died Friday at 71.Mark Blinch/Reuters
Of all the ways Catherine O’Hara was brilliantly funny, she was most brilliant in this: She played the person, not the joke. Humans, she knew, spent about ninety per cent of their lives yearning in vain – for a truer love, a bigger life, for their undeveloped talents to magically be seen – but never quite getting there. (It’s why she excelled in playing characters on the fringes of showbiz in Christopher Guest’s movies, women who reached eagerly for more but never quite grasped it.) The gap between the size of the life and the size of the ego – between how a person thinks she’s coming across and how others actually see her – that’s where O’Hara’s genius thrived.
She understood that most people walk around believing they’re the hero of the story, and she understood why that was funny. She was deeply observant, a savant of specifics. But her unexpected death on Friday at age 71 left the world reeling because as gaspingly funny as O’Hara’s comedy was, it was never cruel. Our raggedy, oblivious humanity – she was fond of that.
Catherine O’Hara, Emmy-winning actor known for Schitt’s Creek and Home Alone, dies at 71
Growing up in Toronto, the second youngest in a noisy Irish-Canadian family, O’Hara competed with her six siblings to be the funniest at the dinner table. Her parents – her father worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway for 45 years; her mother was a homemaker – gave her a sense of right and wrong, along with a strong Catholic faith. (She would say “God bless her” every time an absent friend, such as Gilda Radner, was mentioned.)
From the moment in 1974 that she appeared in Toronto’s Second City comedy troupe, she did what all great comedians do: She committed. She had glorious tools – her wide, elastic mouth; her voice that slid from breathy to brassy; her springy physicality; her unerring choice of the right wig, earring or shoulder pad – and she used them in everything she played. But she was also so subtle. She understood that one hair sticking up could be funnier than a whole tangled rats-nest, that one muttered aside could be richer than a full monologue.
Every moment with O’Hara is a comedy master class. Watch her in the “High IQ” sketches on SCTV, the series she starred in for five seasons (and won an Emmy for co-writing). The sketches are a send-up of a high school quiz show; she plays Margaret Meehan, an eager beaver with a crown of tight St. Pauli Girl braids. To the mounting frustration of the host (Eugene Levy), Margaret keeps buzzing in before he finishes the question, announcing her answers – “The Dewey Decimal System” – somehow certain they’re right. After a few of these, she’s squinting and swallowing and trying not to cry, but she physically cannot stop herself. She’s Margaret Meehan. She doesn’t have a choice.
Watch O’Hara’s ice-cream-truck-driver character turn vigilante in Martin Scorsese’s black comedy film After Hours, so furious and so wrong about everything; or her blithe dismissal of her daughter (Winona Ryder) in Beetlejuice. Watch how effortlessly her ex-studio boss character in the AppleTV+ series The Studio slides from tears to hard-nosed negotiations with her successor, Seth Rogan.
Watch her play drunk in the Chinese restaurant scene in Waiting for Guffman (or any of her scenes playing drunk), because she’s so acute about it: Her drunk women think they’re keeping it together, when actually their reactions are a half-beat late, and they’re waving their hands and mumbling sentence fragments because they can’t quite speak. Watch her as Moira in Schitt’s Creek, when her daughter Alexis (Annie Murphy) auditions tunelessly for a local production of Cabaret, and Moira kicks her fellow judge under the table to make it stop.
Watch it all, because O’Hara was a terrific dramatic actor, too. Real pain moves across the face of Mickey, her zither-playing singer in A Mighty Wind, as she describes her breakup with her husband Mitch (Levy again). She has only a handful of scenes in the HBO series The Last Of Us, but each one is a punch to the heart. In the Schitt’s Creek episode that won the world’s affection, Moira’s face softens with love as she watches her son David (Dan Levy) being serenaded with “Simply the Best” by his “but-ter voiced beau.”
When Moira lands a job as a black-clad Crow Queen cawing her followers to her giant nest in a low-budget fantasy film shot in Eastern Europe, she gives it her all. Partly because she prides herself on being a trouper, but mostly because O’Hara always played it one level deeper. She understood Moira as a human: a never-very-good actress, anxious that her career is over, consumed with fear because she’s broke and living in a motel in a dead-end town, putting a brave face on when she was flatly terrified.
That ex-studio boss in The Studio, that vigilante ice-cream-truck driver in After Hours? O’Hara brought a lifetime of observation to those women: what their fight to make it in a man’s world did to them, how tough they had to play it just to get from today to tomorrow.
From Schitt's Creek to Home Alone, here are five of Catherine O'Hara's greatest performances
The world is mourning O’Hara’s loss – and this nation especially is – because she embodied the traits that are quintessentially Canadian, the best of us: a quiet grace, a self-effacing modesty about her impact and an unerring sense of humour about herself. It’s why she was showered with praise, including an Emmy for Schitt’s Creek, and why she deserved every ort of it.
It’s why she was able to write and deliver the hands-down greatest awards acceptance speech of all time. Winning a best actress Canadian Screen Award for Schitt’s Creek, she arrived at the microphone a bit breathless. “Wow, I’m going to cry,” she said, nervously unfolding her speech. “This is ridiculous. Thank you. I’m sorry, I really didn’t expect this.”
Then she read her speech: “Wow. This is ridiculous. I’m going to cry. I really didn’t expect this.” The audience took a beat to catch up to her, then howled. She looked up, said, “Thank you,” and sauntered off.
Always leave them wanting more – O’Hara did that. She left this stage much too soon. And for what she gave us, we can’t thank her enough.
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