A Cold Day in January

I was going to spend today finishing that new-release roundup I keep promising, but then the news broke that Catherine O’Hara had died. A lot of older artists are dying these days – it’s the boomer cohort, I suppose it can’t be helped – but this loss is especially shocking. O’Hara was only 71, and enjoying one of those incredible third acts in the wake of Schitt’s Creek, and there was so much more ahead of her.

It is really something, given how literally the entire cast of SCTV became beloved performers, to be able to watch Catherine O’Hara and immediately know she’s the best actor in the room. John Candy might have got there if he’d lived longer, I suppose, but … no, O’Hara stood out then and she stands out now. She could put just enough anxiety behind Lola Heatherton’s smile to make her understandable as a person instead of a caricature. I was a kid when I first saw that bit, with no experience of the real talk-show habitués the sketch was sending up. I still understood where she was coming from.

O’Hara was unmatched at making you understand where her characters were coming from. Think of the pissy malevolence she brings to the role of Gail in After Hours. On the page, the character is just a weirdo – a chirpy rando who takes offense when Griffin Dunne’s distracted Paul Hackett doesn’t show her enough appreciation, and eventually organizes a mob to chase him through SoHo. But O’Hara shows us Gail’s decision process, her cheerful mask dropping away as she torments Paul like a cat toying with a wounded mouse. The universe has been fucking with this guy all night; Gail is the one person who actively chooses to make it worse.

But then there are the tiny glimpses of vulnerability she gives the narcissistic Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice, a character detail that’s nowhere on the page. Delia was supposed to be an easy parody of edgy artists; O’Hara gives her this free-floating insecurity underneath the affected self-pity that pushes against the broad strokes of her conception. That gig sparked a friendship with Tim Burton that led to some lovely voice work in The Nightmare Before Christmas and Frankenweenie. Frankenweenie paired her with her old pal Martin Short, and it was a genuine privilege to interview them together when the film came out.

Directors would be fiercely loyal to her; Christopher Guest made her a member of his rep company at the earliest opportunity, pairing her with Eugene Levy – another old pal – for maximum effect. Their scenes in A Mighty Wind, as the aging folkies Mitch and Mickey, have a complex, emotional realism that’s easily the most affecting thing Guest has ever put on screen, because O’Hara once again invests a caricature with a delicate, human vulnerability.

She was, quite simply, great in everything. And she worked with everybody. She’s in Heartburn and Dick Tracy and Wyatt Earp; she’s in Betsy’s Wedding and A Simple Twist of Fate and the very underrated Surviving Christmas, opposite James Gandolfini – with whom she’d work again, sort of, in Spike Jonze’s exhilarating adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. We spoke on that one, too. It was a pleasure to talk to her about acting as both work and play – which was Jonze’s whole deal on that project – and to realize Judith the monster, with her endless curiosity and unceasing empathy, wasn’t too far removed from the woman who’d played her. I suspect that was also Jonze’s whole deal.

Watching O’Hara be discovered all over again as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek was a pleasure, too, even if I never really got into that show. It was just a little too shticky for me – but again, O’Hara’s ability to find something beneath the shtick elevated the whole affair. Her glassy-eyed poise and elasticated delivery launched dozens if not hundreds of memes and viral clips, and reminded everybody just how potent she could be as a comic performer. She won an Emmy for that role, and six Canadian Screen Awards, and suddenly she was in everything again – and just as lively and inventive as ever. It’s heartbreaking to think there won’t be more.

Obviously, a generation grew up with her as Kevin’s Mom in the Home Alone movies – a frantic, utterly committed turn that somehow remains comic even as the character is collapsing into total panic – and I’ve been seeing a lot of posts from that cohort about how shattering this is for them. I get it that. But it’s shattering for everyone, really: Whether or not she was playing a cartoon character, Catherine O’Hara was always the most animated person in anything she did, and it’s impossible to conceive of that life force going out.

... sorry, I don’t have anything more profound to offer. This one just hurts. And I know you feel that too.