David: “How do you fold in the cheese? You fold it, like paper, and just put it in?”
Moira: “Sigh, I can’t show you everything, David. You just…fold in the cheese.”
From the Guardian:
There are nonetheless signature roles and projects for O’Hara, in television and film. There was SCTV, for which she shared a writing Emmy, and her late-career renaissance brought about by her work as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, for which she won a leading actress in a comedy Emmy that pretty much the entire world agreed was richly deserved. In between those pillars, she was an in-demand character actor and constant TV guest star. She’s particularly indelible to generations of kids for playing the frazzled but ultimately dedicated mom in Home Alone and its sequel, serving as the true emotional heart of the original film. She stole scenes in eventual classics such as After Hours and The Paper, hits like Dick Tracy, bombs like Wyatt Earp, and countless comic and voiceover roles. But the two major film collaborations of her career were with her SCTV pal Guest and Tim Burton.
For Guest, O’Hara did flawless teamwork in his mostly mockumentary movies Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. Guffman and Consideration make for poetic but unsparing bookends; the former ends with O’Hara and her on-screen husband Fred Willard leaving small town Missouri to pursue work as film extras in Los Angeles, while Consideration finds O’Hara’s Marilyn butting up against the limitations of her career, with O’Hara doing a virtuosic bit of fake-plastic-surgery acting. Guest makes wonderful meta-text of O’Hara’s genuine dexterity as a performer; she plays a former folk singer in A Mighty Wind, whose breakup with her long-time partner (Eugene Levy) causes his mental breakdown. She’s also paired with Levy for Best in Show, where she’s also (believably) portrayed as more vivacious than her milquetoast beau. Despite the common ground her characters in the Guest films share, they aren’t just comic archetypes, but distinctive people.
Her characters with Burton are equally nuanced, no small feat in such stylized environments. The pair didn’t collaborate as frequently as Burton and Johnny Depp or Danny DeVito, but she was there for one of his biggest breakthroughs, playing artist Delia Deetz, mother to melancholy goth girl Lydia (Winona Ryder), in Beetlejuice, and new caretaker of a house haunted by its sweet-natured former occupants. O’Hara makes Delia somewhat villainous in her garish sculptures and house-wrecking postmodern tastes, as well as her lack of understanding for her daughter; she is also, unquestionably, the heroine of her own story. O’Hara satirizes art-world pretension without sacrificing her innate comic likability. You want to see what this confidently untalented woman gets up to, even as it seems natural for a pair of ghosts to take point on parenting her daughter.
She reteamed with Burton for his animation project The Nightmare Before Christmas, where she provided multiple voices, most notably for female lead Sally, a wistful, stitched-together ragdoll in love with Christmas-besotted Halloween planner Jack Skellington. Though Jack’s singing and speaking parts were divided between two performers, O’Hara did her own singing as Sally, and occasionally performed Sally’s Song in concert later in her career. Given the more clipped, brassy tone she was best-known for in comedies, her work as Sally, a soulful wallflower and twisted vine of yearning, is pretty stunning; you’d never guess it was her.
We all know publications do those obits, keep them on file and update them as things happen.
That was very well written. Thanks.
Also The Atlantic (gift link):
The mom in Home Alone resonates because she’s not just the overworked, underappreciated parent the film sets her up to be—a subversion O’Hara epitomized throughout her career. She had a talent for subtle versatility, the kind that auteur directors picked up on by casting her in movies as different as Heartburn and After Hours. In her most ridiculous assignments, she ensured that her characters were rooted in something familiar, while in her most straightforward roles, O’Hara found ways to cut loose. Consider her most recent appearances: In the Hollywood-skewering comedy The Studio, O’Hara turned a laughable veteran executive into a sympathetic figure. In the postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us, O’Hara translated her character’s thinly veiled resentment into impeccably deployed zingers. She nabbed Emmy nominations for both performances last year.
O’Hara never anticipated such variety; after SCTV, she had trouble figuring out where she belonged as an actor. “Most of the offers I got were to do the work I’d already done,” she said in 1988. “I didn’t want to keep on repeating myself. The problem is that it’s very tough to get a shot at doing something else, especially when you’re not sure what ‘something else’ is.” She never did define that “something else.” Instead, she kept challenging what it could be.
I’m gonna bear your children!
My favorite role of hers was playing the actress in For Your Consideration. In particular the scene where’s she’s alone, watching the spokesman on TV giving out the names of people nominated for the Academy Awards, and going from hope to solemn despair. “Just say my name.”
I’ve been a fan since her SCTV days, and the world is a darker place without her. One of my favorite SCTV skits is Whispers of the Wolf, with the late, great Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd. SCTV Monster Chiller Horror Theatre: Whispers of the Wolf - YouTube
I was shocked when my daughter texted me about her dying. She will be missed.
Thanks for posting Whispers of the Wolf. Really really hilarious. I’d forgotten all about that.
I see Catherine every year in Home Alone.
It’s nice that she continued a friendship with Macaulay Culkin throughout the past 30 years.
John Heard played the dad in Home Alone. He died in 2017.
Catherine’s biggest tv role is 80 episodes of Schitt’s Creek.
RIP and thank you for all the laughs and entertainment
I literally just learned this today, and Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorite movies.
I looked at SCTV’s website and found the complete list of alumni. There are undreds of names, over 30 of whom I’m familiar with, and the ones still among us (not named in your post) include:
Dan Aykroid
Steve Colbert
Tina Fey
Shelley Long
Patrick McKenna (“Harold” on the Red Green Show)
Bill Murray
Amy Sedaris
I had no idea so many of these people were from SCTV.
FYI, SCTV =/= The Second City.
The Second City is an improv theater group, which has troupes in Chicago (where it was founded, hence the name), Toronto, and New York. It’s been around since 1959, and yes, it has hundreds of alumni.
SCTV (or Second City Television) was a TV series originally founded by a group of members of the Toronto Second City troupe, and it took its name from that troupe. It has far fewer cast members, though all of the SCTV cast (except, I think, Rick Moranis) were also members of the Second City improv theater group.
None of the comedians and actors which you list there actually worked on the SCTV television show, though they were all members of a Second City theater group.