The Catherine O’Hara characters who survived the longest never seemed at home in their own mythologies, and the not feeling comfortable became the object. Her acting was big-voices to the balcony, and movements that bore an almost insouciant challenge to the camera to follow them but there was an air of self-awareness about them, which could not be mistaken. She played women who wished to be admired, feared, taken seriously and loved simultaneously and has made their neediness readable without making it punishment. That contrivance, lavishness without contempt, made the audiences continue going back to characters who, on paper, would have been intolerable.
The O’Hara craft was created within the community, competitive pressure cooker of Toronto comedy. Her years of experience at Second City and sketch series SCTV had prepared her to move quickly, create on the spot, and to the specific selflessness of her fellow performers capable of setting up their own without diminishing the self. That creative relationship, which lasted long, with Eugene Levy, was the result of the same ecosystem, and it remained exceptionally intact over decades of shifting formats and stakes. Levy expressed a loss in a later description which was starkly simple, “words do not seem to be sufficient to describe the loss I feel to-day.”
It remained unchanged as well since O’Hara comedy was not overly reliant on likability in the traditional meaning. On SCTV, she was able to act with one archetype of the show the desperate showgirl, the delusional diva and continue to discover different emotional perspectives within the joke. Another secret of her endurance was that the decisions that were considered “big” were not mere decorations. They were behavior: a man in a bid to dominate the room, in an attempt to coerce his way back into relevance, in order to run away with the humiliation. The actor never disguised her vanity in the characters; it was something she appeared to desire to know what it felt like on the inside.
That instinct was to be found in her most popular work. O’Hara played Kate McCallister in Home Alone, a film that required her to make a farce believable by basing it on such a thing as panic among parents. Her “KEVIN!” was a comic music, but also a narrative work: this made the love of the mother credible in a flash, lest the film should turn into cruelty. The occasion is remembered in that she was able to make it an emergency and not a gag.
Then followed Delia Deetz in Beetle juice artist as pose, bundle of nervous taste-making and afterwards the Christopher Guest movies, where improvisation made her talented at showing character in a half beat. In those films, she was allowed to act self-regarding as a survival tactic. The laughs came, but also the familiar pang of a person who cannot help acting even in the absence of the audience.
Schitts creek however provided OHara with the purest runway she could have to showcase her exact type of excess. The rich diction and accent of Moira Rose became texture of the show and also of sound to many viewers their trademark. Of the mechanics, dialect coach Samara Bay explained how O’Hara balancing British and Canadian influences into a thing of her own- how it happened and how it is, and wrote, “There is a conscious and unconscious way in which our voice tells a story of who we are.” O’Hara has made herself a self-perception of self-invention through the voice of Moira, claiming that “I’ve met people whose accents have nothing to do with where they were born or raised they want to reinvent themselves.”
The same conception, reinvention as armour and as yearning, also helped give the late-career resurgence of O’Hara the culture-wide relevance it had, and not just the celebration. Older women are still underrepresented in Hollywood: according to a 2021 Nielsen report, 20 percent of the population is aged above 50 years; the 8 percent figure shows that this demographic is only 8 percent of time viewed on TV screens. What O’Hara managed to achieve in the years following the release of Schitts creek was more of a reminder than an exception about what older women are missing when their niche is considered as the target audience.
In an interview towards the end of her tenure as Moira, O’Hara provided an open and blunt explanation of the reason as to why she was so fond of playing in self-centered artists: “maybe I just want to clear it out of my system. I’m so afraid to be like that.” The line is successful in that it gives the stillness the paradox which lies beneath her most vocal characters. She was able to depict vanity surgically accurately because she did not require it.
