Share and Follow
On the night of September 12, 2005, Manhattan was the place to be for comedy enthusiasts as they could step into a live version of Comedy Heaven. The venue was Makor, connected to the respected 92nd Street Y in Midtown East, housed in a modest building. However, inside, humor legends Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, and Catherine O’Hara were gathered. These performers were integral to SCTV, the brilliantly unique show known for its humorous skits, celebrity impressions, and insider jokes that captivated a generation of boomer night owls. Sadly, news broke on Friday that Catherine O’Hara passed away at the age of 71.
The SCTV series had been off the air for years by the time this reunion took place, with its cast members thriving in successful solo careers. This gathering was sparked by the release of SCTV on DVD, providing a chance to look back fondly. I had the privilege of moderating the panel. Such was my eagerness for the role that I flew from the Toronto International Film Festival, where I was reporting for Premiere magazine, back to New York City and then returned to Toronto the following morning. The trip was worth it not just for Eugene Levy’s praise of my curated clips but also for the warmth and sincerity of the cast. They fondly recalled the creative freedom SCTV afforded them, a freedom they admitted they hadn’t experienced since. Although, as time would tell, they would find similar opportunities again.
O’Hara, like her talented co-stars, excelled in impressions, yet her self-crafted characters left the most lasting impact. Notably, Lola Heatherton, the over-the-top singer, epitomized exaggerated enthusiasm. Her responses to compliments from the likes of Sammy Maudlin (Flaherty) or Bobby Bittman (Levy) were legendary: “I love you Sammy Maudlin/Bobby Bittman! I wanna BEAR YOUR CHILDREN!” O’Hara delivered this humorously, often setting up others for even greater laughs. In one skit, Andrea Martin’s Mother Teresa reacts with perfect bewilderment to Lola’s outburst, adding a comedic cherry on top. Heatherton’s off-key singing, especially in a suggestive holiday special promo, was a highlight. Her character’s story peaked with a faux death to boost her special’s ratings, culminating in a drunken performance addressing past lovers, where she lamented, “You’re all just parasites/draining me of loooooooove,” before calling out “Mr. Bobby ‘How WAS I?’ Bittman.”
O’Hara’s comedic brilliance caught the attention of Martin Scorsese, who cast her in his 1985 dark comedy After Hours. More prominent directors sought her talent, leading to roles in Mike Nichols’ Heartburn and Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, where she portrayed a clueless parent. Her mainstream breakthrough came in 1990 with Home Alone, where she played a mother who miscounts her kids on a family trip to Paris, reuniting her with fellow SCTV alum John Candy. Her dramatic prowess was evident in films like The Paper and Wyatt Earp, and she showcased it again in recent years on the horror series The Last of Us.
O’Hara embraced motherhood a few years after marrying production designer Bo Welch in 1992. She candidly discussed the struggles of balancing work and parenting in Rosanna Arquette’s 2002 documentary Searching for Debra Winger (though she and Arquette shared no scenes in After Hours). Reflecting on the experience, she said, “Sometimes you think ‘well I want my child with me,’ and you drag them to a hotel room. So they can’t have their same toys and the same bed and the same friends. And they’re in the hotel room with you all day with your work. ‘Isn’t it great being in the same city as mummy?’”
Her comedic genius was appreciated by Martin Scorsese, who cast her as one of the many loco women in his 1985 nightmare comedy After Hours. The auteurs continued to call: she was in Mike Nichols’ Heartburn, then Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, in the latter playing a parent who just didn’t understand. It was in the same year, 1990 that she played a parent who didn’t make a proper head count when herding her children off to Paris in Home Alone, the movie that defined her for mainstream audiences and reunited her with SCTV colleague John Candy. She proved an expert dramatic actress in the likes of The Paper and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp. (And did so again more recently in a few episodes of the decidedly this-ain’t-no-party horror series The Last of Us.)
O’Hara became a mom herself a couple of years after marrying production designer Bo Welch in 1992. She discussed the challenges of being a working mom in showbiz in Rosanna Arquette’s 2002 documentary Searching For Debra Winger. (Arquette was also in After Hours, but she and O’Hara had no scenes together.) “Sometimes you think ‘well I want my child with me,’ and you drag them to a hotel room,” she observes. “So they can’t have their same toys and the same bed and the same friends. And they’re in the hotel room with you all day with your work. ‘Isn’t it great being in the same city as mummy?’”
IMDb Score: 7.5
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95%
The oeuvre of director Christopher Guest forms the backbone of the entire mockumentary genre. Waiting For Guffman, A Mighty Wind, and the Netflix original Mascots all create excitement from mundanity and create characters so real you forget they’re Catherine O’Hara or Eugene Levy. Of all his films, Guest’s dog show documentary Best In Show is perhaps his best regarded-and rightly so. Adorable dogs and kooky owners hungry for first prize, what’s not to love?
[Where to stream Best In Show] ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
But in motherhood she did not miss a step, work-wise, and was able to bring the improvisational skills she honed at SCTV to four extraordinary films (“mockumentaries,” some call them) directed by and co-starring Spinal Tap co-creator Christopher Guest: In Waiting For Guffman she and Fred Willard are real-estate agents and amateur thespians; in Best In Show she and Levy are owners of a terrier who’s literally the child they never had; in A Mighty Wind she and Levy are a very estranged one-time folk singing duo; and in For Your Consideration she’s an Oscar-hungry actress with the too-memorable name Marilyn Hack. And again, while she’s unfailingly, hilariously virtuosic in each turn, the generosity she shows her co-performers, Levy especially, is genuinely heartwarming.
I mentioned above that the SCTV people, at the time I interviewed him, thought they’d never enjoy the freedom they had on that show again. It was more that no outside producer or production would give it to them. When Eugene Levy and his equally gifted son Dan Levy created the comedy series Schitt’s Creek, one could infer they did so in part to reclaim their liberty as comedic creators. O’Hara was clearly delighted to come along for the ride. Her character, Moira Rose, the matriarch of the real-estate-challenged Rose family, is a hair-raising inversion of Lola Heatherton. Imagine Heatherton fancying herself a Shakespearean player. Moira’s absolutely loopy self-dramatization and talent for malapropism were sources of endless comedic surprise on that show. What she does is not only lunatic but eruditely so. There’s nothing like it. And there was nothing like her. We were lucky to be able to experience her talent, and it’s a shame and a tragedy that the life she so clearly enjoyed was taken this soon.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.