Catherine O’Hara’s Unforgettable Delivery
In 1978, the actress Catherine O’Hara, then a twenty-four-year-old cast member on the cult Canadian sketch-comedy show “SCTV,” told a late-night interviewer that at times she felt underestimated as a performer. “It sounds like I’m complaining here,” she said. “But I think people don’t take comedy seriously enough.” She went on: “When I get sent for auditions, even for commercials and things, it’s never for an acting commercial, nothing you could act for. It’s always, We need silly goof-off girls.” O’Hara’s gripe, relayed with a wide, warm smile, seemed to stem not from self-pity but from genuine befuddlement; what she was doing on “SCTV” was acting, insomuch as it involved inhabiting characters with such conviction that she more or less disappeared completely into the work. O’Hara, a self-professed “good Catholic girl at heart,” was a natural at the art of sublimation; she had an almost ascetic impulse to vacate her own gentle personality in order to serve as a vessel for whatever eccentric, delusional, hammy weirdos might speak through her. She was nothing like Lola Heatherton, her oblivious, preening lounge-singer character on “SCTV”—who once began an interview with Mother Teresa by asking, “What do you get out of this?”—but there was never a sense that she stood in judgment of Lola’s delusions of grandeur. She approached even her most insufferable characters with compassionate curiosity; they came from within her, but she also couldn’t wait to see what they were going to do next. She once told Rolling Stone, “When I pretend to be someone else, I go to the depths of nothingness. The more I do that—become nothing—and the more I let the character take over, the more I feel like that person. When you become the person, nothing is contrived.”
O’Hara, who died last Friday, at the age of seventy-one, was a great character actress, in the most expansive sense. Over the years, the term has come to have a slightly pejorative slant, signifying a marginal kook who never quite made it into leading-lady territory. But in the case of O’Hara there can be no other way to fully encapsulate her talent. If her death feels like a compounded loss, it is because she takes with her the dozens of offbeat women (and sometimes men) whom she coaxed out of her person and into existence. Her character Kate McCallister, from the 1990 classic “Home Alone,” with her casually elegant wardrobe and her steely determination to get home to her unattended child, became an idealized maternal figure for an entire generation. (When she ran into Macaulay Culkin over the decades, they would greet each other as family; a eulogy Culkin posted for O’Hara on Instagram began with “Mama. I thought we had time.”) I don’t think, for her part, that O’Hara would mind the conflation; she had an innate Canadian modesty and insisted that her favorite role she ever played was “mother of my children.” (O’Hara married the set designer Bo Welch in 1992; she is survived by him and their two children.)
In 2019, I interviewed O’Hara, over cocktails, at the height of a late surge of fame brought on by her Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning role in the surprise-hit sitcom “Schitt’s Creek,” alongside her frequent comedy collaborator Eugene Levy. Unlike her recurring “SCTV” character Chatty Cathy, who prattled incessantly on a talk show called “Enough About Me,” O’Hara was gracious and self-effacing—“I’m talking an awful lot about myself right now,” she said, mid-conversation, as if that wasn’t the point. O’Hara extolled the virtues of improvisational comedy, which she described as the art of “listening to others”—and, in turn, learning how to listen intently to oneself. Like the best sketch comedians, O’Hara was possessed of an impeccable internal tuning fork, and much of her best work came out of an almost musical sense of delivery. Individual words and phrases came out of her mouth with such oddball precision that they became lasting comedic earworms. Think of the stumbling way that Moira Rose, her narcissistic, bewigged matriarch from “Schitt’s Creek,” struggles to pronounce the name “Herb Ertlinger” in a cheesy local commercial for fruit wine; or the way Sheila Albertson, from “Waiting for Guffman,” drunkenly whispers loudly, across a table during an ill-fated double date, “What’s it like to be with a circumcised man?”; or the way Delia Deetz, her deranged sculptor character from “Beetlejuice,” screams, “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!”; or the anguished way that Kate McCallister, realizing that she’s abandoned her son during a holiday vacation, sits bolt upright and cries to the heavens, “Kevin!”
O’Hara maintained that she was at her best when she was part of an interdependent troupe. She began her career as a member of the Second City theatre, in her native Toronto, and its stacked “SCTV” cast, which included the likes of John Candy, Rick Moranis, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, and Levy. Later, she became part of the merry band of players who worked regularly with the director Christopher Guest in films including “Guffman,” “Best in Show,” “A Mighty Wind,” and “For Your Consideration”; she told me that his improvisatory approach provided performers “such a freedom,” even if he once turned down her idea to have her character in “Best in Show” “relax” a dog backstage. Most recently, she was a recurring presence on Apple TV’s ensemble workplace comedy “The Studio,” playing against type as a hard-nosed movie executive freshly out of a job: “Don’t just stand there like a fucking Doordasher,” she barks at her anxious successor, played by Seth Rogen. “Come in!”
O’Hara was the sixth of seven siblings, and her father, a pragmatic man who worked for the Canadian railroad, encouraged her early on to look into secretarial work. (“You can make good money typing,” she recalled him saying.) O’Hara did theatre in high school but didn’t necessarily have her sights set on comedy; she wasn’t even aware that comedic actresses existed until her older brother Marcus, also an aspiring performer, began dating Gilda Radner, whom he’d met while working at a small Toronto theatre. O’Hara instantly revered her. “It was all Gilda as far as opening up my world,” O’Hara told me. Through Radner, O’Hara learned about Second City—a Toronto offshoot of an improv theatre originally founded in Chicago. She bombed her initial audition but remained undeterred; after waitressing for a while at Second City, she became Radner’s understudy, and after Radner departed became one of the two main women in the theatre’s core sketch troupe, along with Andrea Martin. (O’Hara would later grouse that some men in the group would lump her and Martin together. “If one of the guys was writing a scene that was basically about men, they’d say, ‘And then the women come in!’ as if we shared one hip,” she told one interviewer.) There were frustrating aspects to “SCTV,” too—O’Hara was, for a time, paid less than many of her male peers, and filming took place in Edmonton, a four-hour flight from Toronto, on a gruelling schedule that left O’Hara feeling both ragged and homesick—but she flourished creatively, writing most of her own material, for which she earned her first Emmy, in 1982.
In 1981, O’Hara decamped for “S.N.L.,” but left the show before she appeared in even one episode. She’d found out that “SCTV,” which had briefly gone off the air, was set to return to NBC, and she felt called, as she once put it, to “go back to my family.” There was a sadness to many of her characters, who were too socially inept or unself-aware to bring their dreams to fruition. But there was also a resilience there, a devotion to following one’s own intuition at any cost. In “Waiting for Guffman,” O’Hara has the daunting task of playing a bad actress in a small-town Midwestern musical-theatre production, who, try as she might, cannot get in touch with her inner voice. She says, of her blowhard husband turned de-facto acting coach (Fred Willard), that “he’s teaching me to change my instincts, or at least ignore them.” It was a line made all the funnier by the fact that O’Hara herself took exactly the opposite approach as a performer. Her instincts, she knew, were her greatest tool, and she relied on them, hilariously, until the end. ♦