Catherine O’Hara helped get me through high school
I reacted with disbelief yesterday afternoon when I saw the first push notification that Catherine O’Hara had died, at only 71. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” I uttered as I opened the story.
It says something that international media (the BBC, the New York Times, CNN) all saw fit to send push notifications about O’Hara’s death. She had been a Canadian star for almost five decades, but she made an impression — time and again, through a long and wonderful career — everywhere.
SCTV was a fixture for me when I was an adolescent. Produced first on a shoestring in Toronto, the show was kept alive by ITV in Edmonton, where the cast and crew remained to shoot the show through a rocky financing history, even when NBC bailed out and upgraded the show as a complement to the much-better-known Saturday Night Live.
That lineup, from the early 1980s, is stunning to look back upon.
I learned just recently from Paul Myers’s biographyJohn Candy: A Life in Comedy that SCTV‘s producers in 1976 created it in part to keep members of the Second City Toronto troupe from being lured to SNL, then still in its early period. Lorne Michaels of course is Canadian, had already recruited talent from there, and was well aware of what the cast could do.
SCTV eventually got national distribution and went through inevitable cast changes (Candy left and came back; Rick Moranis became the heart of the final years), but O’Hara was golden throughout.
She made Lola Heatherton a character I’ll always associate with growing up:
She was an ace with impressions, like this one of Katherine Hepburn:
The sketches went on and on. By high school, SCTV was a highlight that got me through a sometimes dreary and awkward period of time.
O’Hara may be known widely for a role like Kate McAllister in Home Alone, yelling “Kevin!!” as the plane took off. Writer-producer John Hughes was a big SCTV fan, and by then was a good friend with John Candy. You can see the logic of the casting, as he and director Chris Columbus knew that O’Hara could heighten the comedy but especially bring great warmth to the role.
In Myers’ Candy biography, he reveals that O’Hara and Candy improvised for hours and hours during their single day of shooting together, doing the scene when Kate meets Gus, the polka king whose van brings Kate back home to Kevin. Almost all of their on-the-fly comedy had to stay on the cutting room floor, as it would be jarring for the audience to suddenly see Kate being funny when the character was at the end of her rope. Some of it, though, made it to the final cut:
O’Hara was also a mainstay of the Christopher Guest ensembles, appearing in films like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and For Your Consideration. (Thanks to Guffman, Midnight at the Oasis became a Catherine O’Hara song for me, rather than Maria Muldaur.)
She performed an Oscar-nominated song, A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow, in Guest’s A Mighty Wind, appearing with longtime collaborator Eugene Levy as the remnants of a Sixties singing duo, Mitch and Mickey. The song and their performance were quite affecting in a movie that was knock-dead funny:
Levy and O’Hara will always be linked now — as they absolutely should — for Schitt’s Creek, which they made for CBC between 2015 and 2020. The show eventually found a massive following around the world.
As Moira Rose, the self-obsessed actor in a once filthy rich family, O’Hara had a long-running minefield for comedy, and also for depth. In our house, slipping into Moira’s mannered voice is perfectly welcome when saying phrases like “signature cocktail” or “fold in the cheese.“
O’Hara had a way of stealing the audience’s attention, over and over, even when the screen was filled with comedy talent. Consider the dinner scene in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice:
Most recently, O’Hara had a key role in Seth Rogen’s The Studio. I guess I thought I would see O’Hara grow into her own Katherine Hepburn period.
O’Hara’s personal side had deep empathy. When Candy died in 1994, his funeral was held in Los Angeles, where he had been living (like many of the SCTV folks, including O’Hara, for some time). For the much larger public service in Toronto, the family asked O’Hara to deliver the eulogy.
What a friendship they had, and what a great heart she had, too. Her subject is obviously her great friend, but you’ll learn a lot about her, as well.
There is acclaim everywhere today for Catherine O’Hara. If you have not yet seen it, Macauley Culkin’s tribute to his movie mom is one for the ages.