The recent death of beloved Canadian actor and comedian Catherine O’Hara has devastated fans from Canada to Hollywood and beyond.
Before she was known as Patty Leigh in the comedy powerhouse “The Studio” or the eccentric Moira Rose in the hit sitcom “Schitt’s Creek,” O’Hara was already a household name for an array of classic roles.
Over the years, the Star documented the Toronto native’s storied rise, capturing her budding Hollywood career in the 1980s following her days of improv comedy at Toronto’s Second City.
Here’s a look at some moments that capture O’Hara’s indelible legacy, plucked from our archives.
1. Informing Meryl Streep she spoofed her on SCTV
As she branched out into the film industry in the 1980s, O’Hara worked alongside blockbuster stars Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in the 1986 American comedy drama “Heartburn,” the second major movie for the Canadian actress.
Her first meeting with Streep, however, was not what she was hoping for. “But then, when you’re Catherine O’Hara, they rarely are,” wrote Star reporter Rob Salem in July 1986, one of the earliest mentions of O’Hara in the newspaper:
O’Hara was self-conscious enough. But director Mike Nichols had to make things worse.
“It’s only the first day, and here’s Mike telling Meryl I had done her on SCTV once,” O’Hara recalls with a cringe.
“Then he calls me over to explain the skit to her. So it was like, ‘Well, uh, Miss Streep . . . John Candy and Joe Flaherty did these two country bumpkin characters, and they would have guests on their little talk show and then, umm, blow them up. So I went on as you and, well, I got blown up.’”
Hard enough for her to describe, let alone stand there watching Streep watching her doing Streep when Nichols decided to run a tape of the “SCTV” sketch at the “Heartburn” wrap party.
“People kept coming up to me and saying ‘Meryl is watching it! Meryl is watching it!’ And her face is like this close to the monitor. Afterward she came up to me and said, ‘I saw what you did to me!’ But she laughed. It’s a compliment to be impersonated.”
Streep seems to have taken it that way. Sort of. “Very funny,” the superstar actress responds later with mock sarcasm. “Just wait’ll she sees me do her!”
2. A big break
The Canadian actress got her start working as a waitress at Toronto’s Second City comedy club before joining the cast in the mid-1970s. In 1988, she garnered acclaim on the big screen by playing the high-strung and self-obsessed antagonist Delia Deetz in the blockbuster horror comedy “Beetlejuice.”
While she was already a star in some circles, Beetlejuice is widely considered O’Hara’s breakthrough film role. In October of that year, she spoke with the Star about portraying Deetz in the movie.
”… Initially I thought she was going to be this one-dimensional witch. I mean, she is the villain and everything, but instead of making her just mean, which is how I first read it, she just became someone that gets in everybody’s way because she’s so insecurely self-obsessed.”
The worst part on the film set, she said, was getting French-kissed by a snake — a fake snake. The scene didn’t make it into the movie.
“There was one scene where they wound eight feet of snake body around my legs, and then pulled, so that when they ran it backwards, it looked like it was attacking me. Except the prop guy pulled too hard and I shot six feet into the air. I didn’t feel hurt, but I looked around and saw everyone looking at me as if I were dead. So I started to cry, because maybe I was dead,” she told the newspaper.
3. ‘Home Alone’ in real life
O’Hara famously played Kate McCallister, the frazzled mother determined to get home to her left-behind son Kevin, played by Macaulay Culkin, in the 1990 holiday classic “Home Alone.”
In April, 1990 after O’Hara had just wrapped filming on the movie, she shared with the Star’s Rita Zekas — known for the tongue-in-cheek style of her “Star Gazing” column — about how the film hit “close to home” for her family. Here’s what Zekas wrote:
Seems (O’Hara’s) parents accidentally left one of her sisters — there are three boys and four girls in the O’Hara clan — home when the family took off in the car on vacation. But the difference, O’Hara points out, is that her parents discovered their ommission only 15 minutes from their Toronto home.
“My parents were driving and discovered they’d forgotten her, blocks from our house. In the film, they only had 30 seconds to spare to make the plane, that’s why they left the kid behind.” Moral of story: Your 9-year-old offspring, don’t leave home without him.
4. Love on ‘Beetlejuice’
Four years after her success in “Beetlejuice,” O’Hara walked down the aisle with American production designer Bo Welch in Los Angeles. The couple met on the set of “Beetlejuice” and would become parents to two sons, Matthew and Luke.
Zekas wrote about their wedding in April 1992:
And of course, director Tim Burton was there, if not giving the bride away, then giving up the ghost. It was, after all, on his film set of Beetlejuice that the couple met. She was co-star, he was production designer.
Welch has just wrapped work on Batman Returns, O’Hara has just finished Home Alone 2.
In 2007, when her sons were nine and 12, O’Hara told the Star they were very funny and the couple encouraged their kids’ humour.
“The older one does Warners cartoon bits, really old-fashioned, cheap-ass funny vaudeville stuff. And the little one does word play,” she said.
Matthew and Luke reportedly have followed their father into the production side of the entertainment industry.
5. Remembering John Candy
In March 1994, O’Hara gave the eulogy for fellow Canadian actor John Candy, her friend and “SCTV” colleague, at his memorial service in Toronto. It was held at St. Basil’s Church, where Candy and his wife were married.
“I am just one of the millions of people whose lives were enriched by the life that was John Candy,” she told mourners who had filled the church.
The Star’s Rob Salem wrote about her “fond, funny, emotional,” speech:
“People just loved John. And he loved them back. He was the kindest, sweetest, gentlest, most generous soul.”
“Mrs. Candy,” she continued, as she and just about everyone else in the room began to tear up, “I don’t know what you did to be blessed with such a wonderful son. But all of us thank you for it. And for him.”
6. Friends and co-stars
In “Schitt’s Creek,” O’Hara was the wig-wearing matriarch Moira Rose — whose accent was as bewildering as her cheese-holding skills or singing — with longtime collaborator Eugene Levy as patriarch Johnny Rose. The Canadian TV series created by Levy and his son and co-star Dan made history at the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards in 2020 by becoming the first comedy series to sweep all seven major categories in a single year.
The chemistry between O’Hara and the elder Levy was decades in the making.
O’Hara and Levy met in the early 1970s as members of the Second City comedy troupe and its “SCTV” sketch show. After that, the two shared the stage and screen repeatedly, enjoying a deep friendship spanning more than 50 years.
The pair were standouts in mockumentaries made by Christopher Guest, like “Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” and “A Mighty Wind.” But some of their work together was lesser known.
Back in 2001, the Star’s Rob Salem wrote — prophetically, it would turn out — about the debut of “Committed,” a short-lived, animated series on CTV that was adapted from the syndicated comic strip by Michael Fry:
Though cleverly written and impeccably voiced — by reunited SCTV alums Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin, with ex-Kid In The Hall Dave Foley as the family dog — the show is just a little too (forgive me) two-dimensional for my taste.
But imagine putting this talented cast in a real, live sitcom. Not that it could ever happen. As it is, they are rarely in the same room, or even the same city, at the same time to do the voices.
“But it is an interesting idea,” allows Levy, who took time out to chat during a break in his shooting schedule on the much-anticipated American Pie 2.
Indeed, he and O’Hara have had some casual conversation about finding more to do together. Incredibly, in all the years they’ve collaborated, “Committed” is only the second time they have portrayed a couple — the first being last year’s acclaimed improv feature, “Best In Show,” co-written by Levy and Christopher Guest.
7. Two stars on Canada’s Walk of Fame
In 2007, O’Hara was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in Arts & Entertainment for her celebrated work in film and television:
“I’m a proud Canadian, and more than a little embarrassed about all this attention turned my way,” said O’Hara, who burst into tears when her sister, Mary Margaret, sang to introduce her at the Hummingbird Centre.
It was technically O’Hara’s second star on Canada’s Walk of Fame. The first, at least by association, was awarded in 2002 to the cast of “Second City Television.”
“But I wasn’t at that one,” O’Hara said. “I swear, it happened and I had nothing to do with it. I don’t think I was even invited. I remember I was like, ‘Isn’t that nice … Hey, wait a minute, I was on SCTV …’
“Really, it was just me being greedy, waiting for them to ask me on my own,” she added.
8. Stealing a fashion show
At a fashion show during L’Oreal Fashion Week in Toronto in 2008, O’Hara joined fellow Canadian celebrities in modelling custom gowns. But she took the spotlight with a memorable mishap.
As Star reporter David Graham wrote:
Toronto comic actress Catherine O’Hara stole the show Tuesday evening when the heel of her shoe became snagged in the train of her flamboyant Thien Le designer gown, sending her sprawling.
Playing masterfully to the audience, O’Hara stayed down for the count, then deftly rebounded, struck a pose for the photographers, returned to the entrance of the runway — and fell again.
“I can’t believe I went down,” she said in an interview afterward. “I think everyone thought I was doing a bit.”
9. Oscar-worthy
In the 2006 comedy movie “For Your Consideration,” directed by Christopher Guest, O’Hara delivered a haunting performance. Star reporter Rob Salem wrote:
It could be described, with all due irony, as “an Oscar-worthy performance” — were comedy ever to be taken seriously by the voting members of the Academy. Let alone unscripted comedy.
The irony, of course, is that Catherine O’Hara, in her virtuoso lead performance in the new Christopher Guest improv comedy “For Your Consideration,” plays a timid, tenuous no-name actress who morphs into a kind of Hollywood monster when rumours start to circulate about her possible Oscar nomination.
It spoils nothing to reveal that she does not get it — the Oscar or even the nomination. Guest’s films, in addition to being consistently, wildly, organically funny, tend to revolve around eccentric people who aspire to great heights and rarely achieve them.
Thus comes the Toronto actress’s magical moment, near the end of the film, when her performance transcends its heightened reality and becomes … something else.
