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Catherine O’Hara has never been afraid to do big things. Moira Rose’s wild accent in “Schitt’s Creek.” Delia Deetz’s obsessive dance in “Day-O”Beetlejuice“. She screamed “Kevin! ” way to play Kate McCallister in two “Home Alone” movies.
But it’s not just boldness that makes her great, her characters are also unforgettable: no matter how absurd, absurd or even clichéd they appear on the page, there’s always a beating heart, sparkling with compassion, beneath the silliness. Yes, even playing Cookie Fleck and all her ex-boyfriends on Best in Show.
Kevin Nealon puts it simply: “She changed many of our understandings of comedy and humanity.”
Her characters will influence generations of film, television and comedy fans due to her innate grasp of her craft, unwillingness to indulge in nostalgia, and uncanny ability to reinvent herself with every project. Before her death at age 71, she was still forging new paths, playing ousted studio executive Patty Leigh in “The Studio.” She does it all with grace and humility, becoming a heroine only when the role and costume demand it.
As a fellow Canadian Sarah Polleywhom she collaborated with on “The Studio,” writes Instagram Friday: “She was the kindest and most graceful. How could she also be the funniest person in the world?”
Eight years younger than another comedy pioneer, Gilda Radner, who was an understudy in Toronto’s “Second City,” O’Hara was not an obvious candidate for stardom, as she grew up the second of seven children in a decidedly non-showbiz Catholic family. But she loved comedy, was obsessed with Monty Python in high school, and even tried to meet them at the airport after hearing they were flying in. When her brother started dating Lardner, she followed that thread into the improv scene.
However, her first job was not on stage, but as a waitress, and she absorbed everything she could. Although she was rejected after her first audition, she was undeterred; she joined the company in 1974. By 1976, she became an integral part of the “SCTV” cast’s transition to television, where she played original characters and impersonated well-known figures of the time, including Meryl Streepwith whom she later performed.
“My crutch is, in improv, when there’s doubt, I go crazy and act like crazy,” O’Hara told The New Yorker in 2019. “You don’t have to justify anything that comes out of your mouth. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
When the show ended in 1984, she craved something more, something deeper, and began reading movie scripts. Some viewed her pickiness, which included quitting “Saturday Night Live,” as a lack of ambition. The most important thing for her is waiting for the right thing to happen. Although she had a rocky film debut (in the poorly reviewed Canadian thriller “Double Negative,” working with “SCTV” peers like John Candy and Eugene Levy), she was soon working with the likes of Martin Scorsese in “After Hours” and “Heartburn’s” Mike Nichols, playing Streep and Jack Nicholson’s gossipy Circle reporter friend in “Heartburn.”
“You have to try to make the person a real person,” she told CNN in a 1986 interview. “When I first read it, I thought oh, this woman does nothing but gossip. But then I started to see her as a person, like myself.”
This impulse served her well as she rose through the ranks in Hollywood in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You could watch Home Alone to see that, but O’Hara plays it emotionally and down to earth, like a mother trying to get back to her child. Yes, there was humor (remember fake Rolexes?), but after a while, there were tears. Even Delia Deetz is easily relatable, giving her husband a cold glare when he suggests that she might now be able to get a decent meal in her new suburban prison.
She was vibrant in period costume as Wyatt Earp’s sister-in-law; she was sweet and crazy as Colin Hanks’ depressed, overwhelmed mother in “Orange County”; and she was crazy and crazy as Marty Funkhouser’s sister Bam Bam in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
From her perspective, there’s nothing bigger than “Schitt’s Creek,” the unlikely cultural phenomenon in which everyone suddenly pronounced babies as “bébé” (and it wasn’t because of the sudden proliferation of French on Duolingo). Few actors can create their own language and rhythms like O’Hara and Moira Rose.
She told Rolling Stone in 2020 that the distinct and unplaceable accent was a bit of a “defense of creativity.” She was inspired by the women she met over the years who created new personas out of a sense of insecurity and pride. In terms of appearance, the socialite Daphne Guinness is the starting point.
“I think Canadians have a sense of humor not just about other people, but about themselves, and I think that’s the healthiest, best sense of humor,” she said in the same Rolling Stone interview. “It has an edge, but it’s full of compassion and love.”
Think of Levy’s Mickey and O’Hara’s Mickey singing the parody ballad “Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” with saccharine lyrics in Christopher Guest’s “A Mighty Wind.” This is ridiculous. This is very interesting. It may also make you cry.