It is painful to have to write about Catherine O'Hara, such a lively and vivacious presence, in the past tense. O'Hara has lived inside my head. Is it too corny to say my heart? – from “SCTV” to “Schitt's Creek” and “The Studio”, the second season of which he was scheduled to begin working on, when he died on Friday at the age of 71.
Any appearance constituted a recommendation (a blessing) for anything in which she appeared; You felt like she would only say yes to things that used her well, that sounded fun or interesting, and that her casting reflected well on the project and the people who cast her. I don't consider her a careerist, but rather a Canadian. About joining “Schitt's Creek,” she said when I interviewed her in 2015, “it took me a few moments to commit, [but] I already trusted [co-creator, co-star] Eugene [Levy] as a writer and actor, and as a good man I could spend time with.”
That's how it all started for her, in Toronto, where her brother Marcus was dating Gilda Radner, who was in “Godspell” with Levy and Martin Short. “And it was really watching Gilda that I realized, because I'd always liked acting in school, that it was actually a local possibility. And then she went into the Second City theater, and I was a waitress there, it's like I stalked her, and then she did the show for a while and then took a job for the National Lampoon. So I had to understudy or take her place; I joined the cast, and Eugene was in it. Really, it was just the luck of having a professional actor all of a sudden. in my life.”
As an early adopter of “SCTV,” I found O'Hara attractive first because she was funny, but she was also beautiful, a beauty I could subvert through a subtle or extensive rearrangement of her features. Although she is primarily a comedic actress, her characters can feel hurt or tragic beneath the surface; even Lola Heatherton, one of her signature “SCTV” characters, a buxom, sequined cheerleader (“I love you! I want to have your babies!” was a catchphrase) is built on desperation. Among many, many other roles, she played a teenage Brooke Shields singing “Whip It!” Devo's Katherine Hepburn, a depressed Ingmar Bergman character and, most memorably, perky teenage quiz show contestant Margaret Meehan, who enters with answers before the questions are asked and dissolves into tears as the host (Levy) becomes increasingly angry.
Elsewhere, she played a forgetful suburban mother in “Home Alone,” the work for which she is arguably best known, given her continued widespread popularity; an ice cream truck driver who picks on Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese's “After Hours”; and a tacky art snob and indifferent mother in “Beetlejuice,” where she met her future husband, production designer Bo Welch. He shined in three Christopher Guest films, alongside Fred Willard in “Waiting for Guffman” as community stars; alongside Levy in “Best in Show,” as a dog sitter with many ex-boyfriends; with Levy again on “A Mighty Wind,” as a ’60s folk duo reuniting; and in “For Your Consideration” as an elderly actress who dreams of an Oscar. In the great Netflix miniseries “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (also designed by Welch), she played an evil optometrist, the one-time girlfriend of Neil Patrick Harris's Count Olaf, dark, cold and sexy. Last year, she earned a supporting actress Emmy nomination for her role as a dethroned but not brought down executive in “The Studio”; She is fierce and fun. And, although she was primarily a comedic actress, she could act honestly, as in the second season of “The Last of Us,” penetrating alongside Pedro Pascal as his therapist and the widow of a man he killed.
Brought to life across six increasingly rich seasons of “Schitt's Creek,” Moira Rose is undoubtedly its greatest achievement, a completely original, Emmy-winning creation whose quirks and complexities were embraced by a wide audience; In the future, she will be a reference to describe other characters, a “Moira Rose type”, without needing an explanation. With her original, choppy way of speaking, emphasizing strange syllables and stretching random vowels to the breaking point, her crazy fashion and her family of wigs, Moira is a sketch character with depth. Of all the Roses, she is the most reluctant to adapt to her motel world, to come down from the mountain, but she is as needy as she is condescending, and behind her fantastical, tightly structured shell is a fear that is terribly moving when it shows through the cracks.
Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara in a scene from “Schitt's Creek.” The actors worked together frequently over the years.
(PopTV)
“I like to think she's really threatened by this small-town life, because she's been there, you know?” O'Hara said as the series began. “That just makes him more threatening in my mind. And I like to think of her as more vulnerable than just snobbish or superior. I think she's a lot more insecure.”
Her tentative acceptance of her circumstances, as well as the show's overall arc, finds expression in the series finale, where, all white and gold, with flowing robes and long blonde locks cascading from beneath a bishop's hat, she tearfully conducts the wedding of her son, David (co-creator Dan Levy). Speaking of a kind of wind of fate, he says: “All we can wish for our families, for those we love, is for that wind to finally put us on solid ground. And I think that's precisely what it has done for my family in this small town, in the middle of nowhere.” Maybe you cry too.
I was lucky enough to speak with O'Hara several times throughout the series. The last one was in Canada, a day or two before the last day of filming. We sat on the deck of the Rosebud Motel, looking across the muddy parking lot to where fans were gathered on the path above.
“They're there for each other as well as for us. It's almost like we don't have to be there, but we bring them together somehow.” That's what the actors and the stories they tell give us: the joy and sometimes the pain: a world of strangers, united in this terrible time, for the love of Catherine O'Hara.
