It’s a sad day. It is Catherine O’Hara’s birthday. What a tragic loss. Unexpected. I am glad I so appreciated her – and venerated her, really – while she was still with us. There was nobody – NOBODY – like her.
The first time I noticed Catherine O’Hara was in her one big scene in Heartburn. It takes place in a grocery store, and she – a put-together gossipy Washington D.C. wife – runs into Meryl Streep’s character – who is all a MESS – and O’Hara practically steals the scene from right out underneath Streep’s feet, and … that’s not an easy feat, particularly considering what Meryl is doing. It’s a scene between equals, clear as day. Meryl would wipe the floor with anyone not up to her level. I had no idea who O’Hara was when I saw Heartburn, or didn’t really put it together that she was the same person as the one on SCTV.
She was one of the most eerily talented actresses I’ve ever seen. Like, she was Madeline Kahn level (and almost no one is on Madeline Kahn level). The O’Hara-Kahn level is NOT a crowded space. In fact, it is sparsely populated. Very few people can transform like O’Hara did. She seemed to swap out her soul. Her characters were down in her cellular structures. Sometimes I’d watch her and think, “But … how … why …”
Cleary it’s talent. Clearly it came from her sharp observational skills. She missed nothing. But I think there’s another thing at work here, something more mysterious, and that mystery is what separates, say, a talented impressionist, or even a talented character actor – from someone like her. If you believe in this sort of stuff, you could say she was channeling.
I’ve always felt that actors who “come up” in comedy and then switch to drama – they often have more versatility, depth, width, capacity. Now there are many exceptions, of course! Some talents are narrow, some are wide. But: there is a commonality. There’s something about those who start out in sketch comedy or improv. People express surprise when, say, Adam Sandler is “good” in movies like Punch Drunk Love or Uncut Gems. If anyone saw Hateship Loveship, which they mostly didn’t more’s the pity, people would have expressed shock at Kristen Wiig’s touching dramatic performance. There should be no surprise. Actors with improv or sketch comedy backgrounds work FAST and they work DEEP. They go deep fast.
The subject obsesses me, maybe because I’m not sure why it is true, and it’s fun to think about, so I wrote about it for my column at Film Comment. In the column, I focused mostly on women who “came up” in comedy. Lily Tomlin. Kristen Wiig. Catherine O’Hara. O’Hara is funny but she is also tragic. She can be both at the same time. She could bring in the tragic in her most comedic characters. (I wrote about one of those moments in the column I linked to.)
I keep coming back to the word eerie. Maybe “uncanny” is better.
Because I just do not know how she did what she did.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Having discovered O’Hara via SCTV, and enjoyed her work ever since, I was so happy when she found her role in Schitt’s Creek. The number of women who get to keep doing interesting work into their sixties is vanishingly small, so it was a kind of relief when she broke into that group. The scene in For Your Consideration when the camera crew interviews her on the mroning when she is *not* nominated for an Oscar is one of the truly painful moments I’ve watched in movies.
Her scene in the Chinese restaurant in Waiting for Guffman is the best drunk acting I’ve ever seen.
oh my God yes