Catherine O’Hara was a goddess of surprise. Between her film and TV roles and her years on Canada’s “Second City Television,” aka “SCTV,” she played an astonishing array of characters, including little Kevin’s forgetful but warm-hearted mom Kate in the “Home Alone” films; the self-involved would-be influencer/guru in two “Beetlejuice” movies, and a dazzling spectrum of kooks in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, beginning with 1996’s “Waiting for Guffman,” about a community theater troupe in Blaine, Missouri, and continuing for ten years, through the 2006 Oscar race spoof “For Your Consideration.”
No two were alike. And once she’d dug into them, she was so committed that you stopped thinking of them as fictional constructs and started to feel as if you were just watching a person being themselves. A bizarre person, that is.
Look at this clip from “Best in Show,” Guest’s portrait of show dog owners on the competitive circuit. As is the case in all of Guest’s pretend docs, every character is an eccentric who thinks they’re normal, which ultimately calls into question the idea of normalcy. She and Eugene Levy, another “SCTV” alum, play Gerry and Cookie Fleck. Gerry is a nebbish who’s proud of having married a gorgeous and sexy woman, but deeply insecure about how many other men she’s been with—especially the exes who keep trying to pick up Cookie with Gerry standing right there like Mr. Cellophane in “Chicago.”
Cookie is a hilarious creation, and refreshingly free of cliches. Rather than make her into a comic femme fatale, manipulative and deceitful, O’Hara plays her as an innocent in thrall to forces within herself that dictate her actions and are so powerful that she has to obey. She doesn’t consciously disrespect her husband. She just seems to forget that he’s there, even when they’re being interviewed by a film crew. Her desire is a beast that must be satiated, or at least acknowledged, as we see in this scene where Gerry says that when he met Cookie high school, she had already gone out with “dozens” of other guys. “Hundreds,” Cookie interjects, so softly it’s as if she didn’t mean to say it out loud. “I did not know that,” Gerry says, smiling and chuckling so he doesn’t cringe. “Hundreds.” A few moments later, Cookie laughs affectionately as Gerry explains that it was hard for them to dance because he has two left feet, and it’s not a euphemism.
It’s a good thing Cookie is played by an actress who is objectively a knockout, radiating such irresistible life force that you believe she’d be Blaine’s equivalent to Helen of Troy. Otherwise the entire premise would have just seemed tawdry and sad. Luckily, O’Hara, an Irish Catholic from Toronto who had a megawatt smile and the silhouette of a pinup from the 1940s, was a comic performer in the vein of Madeline Kahn, a woman of such skill that she put her loveliness in service of the scripts instead of letting it overwhelm them. This was sometimes the case with Marilyn Monroe, a comic bombshell who had her own special screen magic, but didn’t have Kahn or O’Hara’s versatility.
Levy would continue to act with O’Hara up through their final project together, the popular comedy series “Schitt’s Creek.” A joint venture between him and his son Dan Levy, the series started out on the now-defunct PopTV but became a worldwide sensation after repeats were licensed by Netflix. For 80 episodes, O’Hara played Moira Rose, a former socialite and soap opera star humbled after her husband Johnny (Levy) lost the fortune he’d built as CEO of a video rental empire. O’Hara turned Moira the ultimate O’Hara oddball, cherry-picking elements from dozens of other women she’d played on film and TV, then infusing the performance with the otherworldly singularity she’d been accessing for half a century. Moira bizarrely altered common words and employed vernacular that went out of fashion a hundred years before her birth. Her borderline outlandish black-and-white designer outfits, accessorized with furs and giant hats, signaled her utter unsuitability for life in the title town. It was as if Eva Gabor’s character from the 1960s sitcom “Green Acres” had been given depth and pathos.
Levy and Levy envisioned O’Hara playing Moira from the moment they thought of the show. “What a gift to have gotten to dance in the warm glow of Catherine O’Hara’s brilliance for all those years,” Dan Levy said in a statement after her passing. “Having spent over fifty years collaborating with my Dad, Catherine was extended family before she ever played my family.”
O’Hara and the senior Levy met in Toronto when O’Hara was 19 and he was 28. Levy was in a production of the musical Godspell with Martin Short, Victor Garber, Paul Schaeffer, and Gilda Radner. O’Hara was in the audience but already connected to the performers through her brother, who was dating Radner the time. Short invited O’Hara to have drinks with the cast after the show. The following year, “SCTV” got its own Toronto venue, a coffee shop. Levy ran into O’Hara again, but this time she was a waitress at the venue who also the understudy for the troupe’s female performers. She kept auditioning to be in the main cast, but didn’t get in for another year, mainly because the troupe worried that she was too young.
There was a mutual attraction, and they dated very briefly. “I did have a crush on him at Second City,” O’Hara said in a New York Post interview with Levy. “Luckily, I got over that so I could work with him and not be nervous all the time.” “Catherine was very cute,” Levy said. “In terms of the gift of impersonation, she’s one of the more…” “Monkey-like?” O’Hara interjected, so instinctively that if you’d assume they were a real life couple if you didn’t know they weren’t.
“I dated everybody at Second City!” she later told People Magazine, in another joint interview with Levy. “We were all in our late teens or early twenties,” O’Hara said, “and when you’re laughing with each other, or making someone laugh, that’s really sexy. Everyone thought, ‘Wow, we’re making each other laugh, maybe we should date!’ But Eugene is a gentleman and I’m the product of Catholic parents, so there’s no real story there. Thankfully, we remained friends.”
On “SCTV,” she did brilliant impersonations of celebrities past and present, including Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn and Brooke Shields, and invented striking and endlessly amusing fictional characters, such as the aggressively risqué variety show legend Dusty Towne, loosely based on real-life comic performer Rusty Warren. It’s hard to choose a greatest moment, but “The Dusty Towne Sexy Holiday Special” is surely a contender.
O’Hara always seemed to uncover more layers in her characters than were indicated in the scripts, even when the scripts were good to great. For proof, look at either of the “Home Alone” movies, where she plays a character who is mainly an extension of the little boy protagonist and therefore could have been played by nearly anybody in the right age range and demographic category, but makes her not only specific but charming and relatable, so that you don’t despise a mom who went on vacation but forgot one of her kids. (She was also above-and-beyond as a very different mom in “Monster House.”)
You can feel the dedication she brought to her voice acting, which too many on-camera actors figuratively as well as literally phone in. She gave every one of these roles special attention, whether or not it deserved it. If you made a list of the greatest vocal performance of all time, O’Hara might claim multiple slots. She was heartbreaking and sweet as the scarred but still hopeful character Sally in “The Nightmare Before Christmas”; bonkers funny as Morticia’s mother Grandma Frump in the animated “The Addams Family,” who appears via seance; and explosively funny as Judith, the irritating three-horned, leonine girlfriend of the quiet and gentle Ira (Forest Whitaker) in “Where the Wild Things Are.”
O’Hara’s quick decline and death came as a shock even to many who were close to her. Last year, she did a Los Angeles Times interview to promote the Apple TV comedy series “The Studio” on which she played Patti Leigh, the former head of Continental Studios and mentor to her successor, played by Seth Rogen, and responded to an interviewer’s question about whether she felt like she’s gained more power as an actor with age. ” “I’ve been treated that way lately. Am I dying or something?” she said. “I’m not used to it.”
It was just bleak self-deprecation, no different from what anyone else of her stature and age might’ve said when replying to a flattering question. But she did have a condition: Situs Inversus, in which the position of a patient’s organs are reversed, potentially causing life threatening complications. O’Hara’s reversed organ was her heart—a specific condition called Dextocardia Situs Inversus. She went to the hospital early in the morning on the day of her passing because she felt very ill and was gone soon after. She first publicly spoke about her condition in a YouTube interview in 2020, saying she’d been diagnosed with it twenty years earlier but hadn’t manifested symptoms. She is survived by her husband of nearly 40 years, production designer Bo Welch—who met her on the set of the 1988 “Beetlejuice”—and their two now-adult sons Matthew and Luke, who followed their father into the sets and props business.
Her work lives on. ““I think the success of my work stems from being truthful,” O’Hara, said in a 1983 Rolling Stone interview about her decision to leave “SCTV.” “I used to say in scenes, ‘If we write this, then that’s a lie.’ Dave Thomas [an SCTV costar] would always say, ‘A lie! What do you care about lies? Are you the Queen of Truth or what?!’ But what I meant by truthfulness, by telling the truth, was that 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.”
