In 1981, when I was a 20-year-old college junior, it was cool to like “Saturday Night Live” (still too young to be called “SNL”), which had premiered a few years before. It was even cooler to like “SCTV,” the antic Canadian comedy series that ran only intermittently on late-night TV in the US.
So, desperate to understand what all the cool kids liked, I started watching it. The conceit of “SCTV” (Second City Television) was that it was a TV station in Melonville (ostensibly a small town in Canada) that pushed out the kind of cheap local programming that filled the airwaves in those days. “SCTV,” then, would feature “shows” with actors like John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy, including my favorite, “Dr. Tongue’s Evil House of Pancakes.” In 3-D!
The first skit I remember seeing was Catherine O’Hara playing the desperate and only marginally talented lounge singer Lola Heatherton. (For those too young to remember, the character’s name was a combo of Lola Falana and Joey Heatherton, both 1970s TV staples.) Lola was hosting a show called “Way to Go, Woman,” where she promised to interview and “totally involve myself” in the lives of the “five of the most influential women of our time.” One of her guests was Mother Teresa (played by Andrea Martin). Dressed in a lamé facsimile of a Missionaries of Charity habit, Lola crooned a disco tribute to Mother as she cared for the poor, expressed surprise that poor people in Calcutta didn’t recognize her and uttered the deathless line, “Oh, Mommy Teresa, you’re so special it’s scary!”
“SCTV”’s creative premise allowed Catherine O’Hara to play a raft of nutty fictional characters, as well as real-life actors like Brooke Shields, Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn, once admitting to Johnny Carson that she patterned her imitation of Ms. Hepburn not on the star herself, but on Martin Short’s imitation.
After SCTV went off the air, I followed Catherine O’Hara’s career assiduously, and was, like all her fans, never disappointed in her unhinged but affectionate take on humanity.
One possible reason for the outpouring of love for her after she died yesterday at age 71 (some of my friends, not given to emotion, said they wept when they heard it), was that she was beloved by several generations for many unforgettable and, again, unhinged roles. My generation (I’m 65 now) knew her first from SCTV. The next generation would know her as the mom from perhaps her most well-known film, “Home Alone.” Around that same time, those with darker sensibilities loved her as Delia Deetz, the deluded artist (and Harry Belafonte channeler) in Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice.” A still later generation would enjoy her performances in Christopher Guest-directed mockumentaries like “Best in Show,” where she showcased her remarkable gift for physical comedy. Finally, today’s generation adored her for her late-career pièce-de-resistance, Moira Rose, the malaprop-prone, but surprisingly articulate and eventually devoted mother in “Schitt’s Creek,” a series that helped Covid be less awful for many people, including me. Her shifting pronunciation of baby (or bé-bé) deserved its own Emmy.
And since this is a website for LGBTQ people, I can say, based on the reactions of some of my LGBTQ friends, that Moira Rose was a huge hit with many gay men, who admired her not only for her over-the-top wardrobe but her insistence in being herself, even if that self was “more dramatic than needed,” as a friend said last night. Conor Reidy, Outreach’s executive director, appreciated her “affection for wigs.”
Catherine O’Hara was raised in a Catholic family and those roots showed up in public from time to time, as during her touching eulogy for her friend John Candy, a quote about what a gift from God humor is and how the role she most wanted be remembered for was as a mother to her two children.
What I enjoyed most about Catherine O’Hara was not only her sheer talent, her once-in-a-generation gift for comedy and her always unpredictable line readings, but how she imbued a sense of compassion for all her oddball characters. In an obituary for the New York Times, she is quoted as saying, “I love playing people who have no real sense of the impression they’re making on anyone else. But the more I say it, the more I realize that’s all of us, and the internet, social networking, is a desperate attempt to try to control what others think of you.” She called her characters “insecure delusional.”
Underneath the insecure delusions of Moira Rose and her other characters (maybe even Lola Heatherton), you felt, were real people trying to do their best.
You also felt that Catherine O’Hara had compassion for their efforts, even the misguided ones. And, as she said, for “all of us.” With that blend of genuine understanding and kooky humor, she made several generations of fans laugh, sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes uncontrollably.
What a great way to spend a life—with compassion and humor. Catherine O’Hara, you were so special it was a blessing.
