Catherine O’Hara manages to make difficult characters utterly delightful | Catherine O’Hara

HeyOne of Christopher Guest’s later, lesser-known comedies featuring his peerless troupe of improvisers often associated with SCTV is For Your Sight, a funny middling savagery of Hollywood’s overheated awards season prestige campaign.

The highlight of the film is Catherine O’Hara, who plays an actress who gets a lot of awards buzz for a cheesy drama still being filmed called Home for Purim, and slowly loses her mind knowing that she might be recognized by her peers. O’Hara, known for her distinctive, brassy voice and often red hair, peels back her artist’s guts to reveal the frenetic need that lies beneath. Somehow she plays the role of the big under the regular, as Marilyn Hack goes from workhorse to desperate struggler. Unsurprisingly, O’Hara briefly generated accolades of her own for playing the role. Less surprising is that an Oscar nomination was not forthcoming. It cannot be; Otherwise, he might have spoiled O’Hara’s brilliant lessons in how some actors, especially comedy professionals, go unrecognized in their lives.

The difference, of course, is that O’Hara portrays Marilyn Hack, with tragicomic precision, as a mediocre person. It was not O’Hara, who passed away today at the age of 71. She was exceptional, and within her reputation as primarily a comedienne, she had exceptional range. It was the best script for an artist trained in sketch comedy, able to slip into different characters and make them come alive instantly.

However, there are O’Hara’s signature roles and projects, in television and film. There was SCTV, for which she shared an Emmy for writing, and the late-career renaissance that resulted from her work as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, for which she won a Leading Actress in a Comedy Emmy that almost the entire world agreed she deserved. In between those pillars, she was a sought-after character actress and perennial television star. She’s particularly indelible to generations of kids because she played the weary but ultimately devoted mother in Home Alone and its sequel, and she serves as the true emotional heart of the original film. She’s stolen scenes from classics like After Hours and The Paper, blockbusters like Dick Tracy, bombs like Wyatt Earp, and countless comedic and voice-over roles. But the two major film collaborations of her career were with her boyfriend SCTV Guest and Tim Burton.

For Guest, O’Hara has done impeccable ensemble work in his mostly satirical films Waiting for Goffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Sight. Goffman and Concern make poetic but harsh notebooks. The former ends with O’Hara and her on-screen husband, Fred Willard, leaving a small town in Missouri to pursue work as film extras in Los Angeles, while Considered finds Marilyn facing the constraints of her career, with O’Hara doing a masterful bit of fake plastic surgery acting. The guest performer makes a wonderful introduction to O’Hara’s true prowess as a performer; She plays a former folk singer in A Mighty Wind, whose breakup with her old partner (Eugene Levy) causes him to have a mental breakdown. She was also paired with Levy for Best Show, where she was also portrayed (believably) as more lively than her beau. Despite the common ground her characters in guest films share, they are not just comedic archetypes, but special people.

Her characters and Burton are equally nuanced, which is no mean feat in such stylized settings. The duo didn’t collaborate as frequently as Burton, Johnny Depp, or Danny DeVito, but she was there for one of his biggest breakthroughs, playing artist Delia Dietz, the grieving mother of goth girl Lydia (Winona Ryder), in Beetlejuice, and the new caretaker of a house haunted by its sweet-natured former residents. O’Hara makes Delia somewhat malicious in her garish sculptures and home-destroying postmodern tastes, as well as her lack of understanding of her daughter; She is also, without a doubt, the heroine of her own story. O’Hara pokes fun at the pretensions of the art world without sacrificing her innate comedic likability. She wants to see what this untalented woman does with confidence, even if it’s normal for a pair of ghosts to raise her daughter.

She returned to collaborate with Burton on his animated project The Nightmare Before Christmas, providing multiple voices, most notably Sally, a sad, stitched-up doll who falls in love with Halloween schemer Jack Skellington. Although Jack’s singing and speaking parts were split between two performers, O’Hara performed the vocals herself as Sally, sometimes performing Sally’s song in concert later in her career. Given the more cropped, brassy tone she’s known for in comedies, her work as Sally, the lusty sunflower and twisted vine of longing, is quite striking; You’d never guess it was her.

Both of Burton’s films were repeated later in her career: for Frankenweenie, Burton’s animated adaptation of his short film, O’Hara again provided multiple voices, equally adept at playing a caring mother and a character referred to only as “Weird Girl”. And in his 2024 legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, O’Hara recast Delia Deetz — and made her, if anything, more likeable than ever as a still-talent-deficient but now completely successful artist who loses her husband, then dies in a ridiculous snake accident, and searches the underworld for her lover. It’s a perfect turn for O’Hara because she seems so indefatigable; What other comedian could be so funny as she grapples with her literal mortality and decides she has her own after-life goal to achieve? It didn’t matter much that Burton no longer had the services of her former on-screen partner Geoffrey Jones; O’Hara makes Delia as funny as ever and strangely poignant as well.

It may be difficult to rewatch this performance in the coming days, now that O’Hara is already gone, so soon. Then again, maybe not; It’s hard to watch any Catherine O’Hara performance, even the most serious one, and not feel delighted by her presence. She has made big, crazy and sometimes abrasive characters such welcome company.