The Angst and the Ecstasy of Catherine O’Hara

Life, as we know, is not always fair. Right now, when the world seems to be becoming a more and more daunting place, it doesn’t seem fair that we’ve just lost a lady so funny that she helps us forget our angst. In a way, angst is one of Catherine O’Hara’s personal specialties. She agonizes so hilariously over life’s vicissitudes that—momentarily, at least—we forget our own. It doesn’t seem right, frankly, that we had to lose her this past January, at age 71.

 O’Hara, Canada-born, was among the zanies at SCTV from 1976 to 1984. In Hollywood she played a number of memorable though subordinate film roles. I remember her fondly in After Hours, Beetlejuice, and as Kevin’s thoroughly rattled mother in Home Alone. Her longest lasting project was surely Schitt’s Creek,  an outrageous TV comedy (2015-2020) about an L.A. show-biz family forced to relocate, because of financial reverses, to a  Canadian town full of heart and not much else. O’Hara played opposite her good friend (and series co-creator) Eugene Levy, as Moira Rose, the snooty, multi-wigged mom who was once a soap opera star, and now can’t easily accept her much-diminished smalltown life. She seemed destined for an equally long run on Seth Rogen’s hit show, set behind the scenes in Hollywood, when death overtook her. Rogen's sweet tribute to her at the recent SAG awards ceremony is worth savoring.  

But I mostly think of O’Hara in conjunction with a trio of films directed and co-written by the remarkable Christopher Guest. Guest, an actual member of British nobility, had played rocker Nigel Tufnel in Rob Reiner’s deathless 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap. The experience led him (along with co-conspirator Eugene Levy and a company of gifted comic actors) to launch three largely improvised indies of his own. The first, Waiting for Guffman (1996) is an affectionate spoof of small-town amateur theatricals. It covers the torturous process of staging a pageant to honor Blaine, Missouri’s 150^th anniversary. (Any connection with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not accidental.) O’Hara and Guest regular Fred Willard play Sheila and Ron Woodard, a perky pair of travel agents who have dreams of musical-theatre stardom. Sheila is prone to drinking a wee bit too much on occasion, which leads her to put her husband in an embarrassing situation indeed.

 By general consensus, the funniest of Guest’s mockumentaries is 2000’s Best in Show, a spoof of dog shows and of the humans who dote on their pedigreed fur babies. O’Hara and Levy are featured as Cookie and Gerry Fleck, a Florida couple who idolize their Norwich terrier and enjoy recording novelty songs in Winky’s honor. Gerry is faced with the challenge of having two left feet (literally), and Cookie—who seems to have enjoyed an exuberant sex life before her marriage—keeps running into former beaus eager to resume the relationship.

 Less well known is A Mighty Wind (2003), which mocks the era when folk music ruled the airwaves. Various Guest regulars (including Parker Posey, Michael McKean, Jane Lynch, and a host of other wacky singing actors) play musicians who amusingly resemble once-legendary groups likes The New Christy Minstrels and The Kingston Trio. The premise is that these groups reunite, decades after their celebrity has faded, for a reunion concert. The stand-outs (as always) are Levy and O’Hara. They play former sweethearts Mitch and Mickey, he now something of a nut case and she a sweet soul with an autoharp and a memory of the kiss at the end of the rainbow. Hilarity of course ensues.