The unexpected news of the passing of Catherine O’Hara at the age of 71 hit the world like a ton of bricks. It didn’t seem true, and it certainly didn’t seem fair.
For decades, O’Hara, a proud Canadian who created some of the most memorable scene-stealers in comedy history, had been finding new and surprising ways to be funny. Every generation had their O’Hara moment, from “SCTV” to “Home Alone” to “Schitt’s Creek”, and each version was more hilarious and bananas than the last.
Born in 1954, O’Hara began her career as a cast member of the legendary improv troupe The Second City, working as an understudy to another iconic comedienne, Gilda Radner. While there, she met the people with whom she’d create “SCTV,” the pioneering Canadian sketch comedy show that introduced the world to a ridiculous array of talent: John Candy, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Harold Ramis and Andrea Martin, to name but a few. O’Hara was a perfect fit for the format, imbued with both range and a penchant for surprise. She could do a killer Katharine Hepburn impression and breathe life into oddball creations like Lola Heatherton, the melodramatic has-been singer forever on the edge of a fabulous breakdown. The typical O’Hara character was a woman who may not be clinically insane but was certainly spiritually so, yet believably human amid their exaggerated quirks.
Post-“SCTV”, O’Hara was prolific, guest appearing on series like “Married… with Children” and “The Outer Limits”, and stealing the scene in several major movies, like Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice.” Her work as Macaulay Culkin’s stressed and guilt-wracked mother in “Home Alone” proved to be a cinematic high point, as did her too-perfect collaborations with Christopher Guest in films like “Waiting for Guffman” and “A Mighty Wind.” She landed an Emmy nomination for a dramatic turn in the TV movie “Temple Grandin.” But, of course, then came Moira Rose.
“Schitt’s Creek” was never meant to be a mega-hit. It was a CBC sitcom that aired on cable in the U.S., and early reviews were mixed. But the show, created by Dan and Eugene Levy, who co-starred alongside O’Hara and his father, was a slow-burn success, and by the time COVID-19 had us all locked indoors, audiences were primed to meet the Rose family. The feel-good series about a formerly rich family forced to downsize in the crassly named town they own won people over with its blend of earnestness and absurdity. Nothing embodied that more than O’Hara’s performance. It reintroduced her to a new audience, one that was shocked to discover that the mother from “Beetlejuice” was still working and could do all that!
Her Moira Rose is a woman of her own world. Armed with a couture wardrobe and seemingly endless cavalcade of wigs, she is a terminally delightful diva whose ego is as boundless as her vocabulary. Like the other Roses, she matured beyond her spoiled petulance to become the town’s fairy godmother, albeit without losing any of her fizzy charm. As with many an O’Hara heroine, it would have been incredibly easy for Moira to be a one-joke figure. In that first season, it felt like she’d be stuck in the same mode, as funny as it was (and it was truly hilarious.) As Moira became less selfish and more committed to aiding others, whether they liked it or not, O’Hara was given even more opportunities to shine.
Like her “SCTV” creations, Moira was an incredible vessel for O’Hara’s gift for physical comedy. Consider the scenes in Season 5 where she films a hacky horror movie called “The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening” and plays a mutant crow-human, covered in pasted-on feathers, with stiff-armed wings a-flapping like a broken puppet. But it’s her line deliveries that made her iconic. We could be here all day listing the best ones (“Stop acting like a disgruntled pelican!”) It often felt like O’Hara had rewritten the English language just for Moira with the way she could twist the simplest word into utter nonsense and hilarity, like “bébé.”
In an interview with The New Yorker, O’Hara said, “When in doubt, play insane.” That sort of explains her approach, for indeed, Moira is a few sequins short of a showstopping gown. Yet there’s humanity amidst the unhinged, a genuine warmth that keeps even her oddest monologues grounded. O’Hara can go big, but she can also be quiet and make you believe this is a real woman who has been hurt by the world. There are moments of true melancholy among even her goofiest characters, like her drunken rant at the end of “For Your Consideration”, where she plays an actress who gets caught up in Oscar rumors only to realize her career is ultimately a middling one. Moira Rose looking on in awe as Stevie sings “Maybe This Time” from “Cabaret” is an all-time sitcom tearjerker. In one of her final TV roles, in the second season of “The Last of Us”, she kept her wry humor as a psychiatrist Joel turns to for help but it’s in a major revelation where her oft-underutilized dramatic chops shone.
It seems unfathomable that we won’t get more Catherine O’Hara in the future (she was set to return to Apple TV’s “The Studio” for its second season), but TV is brighter for having been reshaped by her work. You can see her influence in performers like Maya Rudolph and Kate McKinnon, comediennes who love to put a little extra mustard on every line delivery.
Weird women had one hell of a patron saint in O’Hara, and that legacy will live on long after Moira Rose has run out of wigs.
