'This is my home': How Catherine O'Hara never forgot her Second City Toronto roots

'This is my home'

Photo: The Canadian Press

Catherine O’Hara attends the premiere of "THE WILD ROBOT”, during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, in Toronto on Sunday, September 8, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov

Before Catherine O’Hara became a trail-blazing, uproarious, fearlessly singular force in comedy, she was a young artist cutting her teeth at The Second City Toronto.

It was a place where, according to the sketch comedy troupe’s former CEO, her genius was visible from the very beginning.

“She was a gifted comedian and a gifted actress who had phenomenal instincts. A terrific improviser,” recalls Andrew Alexander.

O’Hara started off working as a waitress at The Second City, and then in coat check, but when cast member Gilda Radner left for “Saturday Night Live” in 1974, she filled her role.

“She immediately took on the parts Gilda had created in an extraordinary way, so quick and fast, so agile… She understood the rules of listening, when you're building a scene and developing material, and making your partner look good,” said Alexander.

“But as a regular human being, she was generous of spirit. She was a really self-deprecating individual who had strong faith.”

O’Hara died Friday at 71 at her home in Los Angeles “following a brief illness,” her agency said in a statement. Details on her cause of death weren’t immediately available.

A Toronto native who grew from an iconoclastic improv talent into an Emmy-winning Hollywood heavyweight — anchored by beloved roles in “Home Alone” and “Schitt’s Creek” — she leaves behind a legacy as a comedy pioneer who paved a way for Canadian performers — particularly women — in the industry.

“Comedy has long been a very male-dominated field, and the work that she did with her castmates like Andrea Martin really created a feeling of opportunity, like there's a path there to participate in this art form and to do it without compromise and with the fullness of your voice,” says Julie Dumais Osborne, Second City’s vice-president of training.

Osborne, who grew up in Toronto, remembers feeling inspired watching O’Hara on “SCTV,” The Second City’s television adaptation where she performed surreal, left-field sketches and impressions alongside eventual comedy icons like Eugene Levy, Martin Short and Martin.

“It was just genius at play, watching her evolve in SCTV, and then everything she did after,” says Alexander, who stepped down as The Second City CEO in 2020 after acknowledging he "failed to create an anti-racist environment," following accusations of racism against the institution, which pledged to make changes.

He added that he’s been in touch with O’Hara’s former SCTV castmates and they are “all in a state of shock” because she was “very private” about what was happening with her health.

Nick Davis, who directed a recent documentary about the 1972 production of hippie musical “Godspell" — which featured Short, Levy, Radner, and Martin and helped give rise to The Second City — says he was always struck by O’Hara’s groundedness.

“She was younger than the rest of that gang. When they were doing the Toronto 'Godspell,' she was a teenager, and she was in their orbit,” says Davis, noting that O’Hara’s brother was dating Radner at the time.

“I wonder if her humility came from the fact that she was the youngest in that crew, and she looked up to them and had seen them on stage before she was herself doing it. She was just very humble, sweet, honest, and down-to-earth, even as some of her characters were outrageously arrogant and hilariously proud.”

When “SCTV” found itself between network homes in 1981, O’Hara briefly joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” She exited the Lorne Michaels — created show after only a few days, without ever appearing on air, and ultimately returned to “SCTV” once NBC picked it up as “SCTV Network 90.”

“She just said, ‘This is my home,’” recalls Alexander.

“I think she realized that sometimes when you're young, you leave the nest. But good fortune was that we wanted her back. We didn't want her to leave, actually. And she smartly realized that.”

O’Hara won her first Emmy in 1982 for her writing on “SCTV Network.” Nearly four decades later, she earned a second Emmy in 2021 — along with a Golden Globe and a slew of Canadian Screen Awards — for her turn as the flamboyant, self-absorbed matriarch Moira Rose on “Schitt’s Creek.”

She boasted a stacked IMDB page throughout her career, including memorable turns as a pretentious socialite in 1988’s “Beetlejuice” and its 2024 sequel, a worn-thin mom in the “Home Alone” franchise and an Oscar-crazed B-list actress in 2006’s “For Your Consideration.”

More recently, she garnered critical praise for playing a down-and-out former Hollywood exec in Seth Rogen’s “The Studio,” for which she earned Emmy and Golden Globe nods last year.

But O’Hara carried home in her heart no matter how far she travelled. Osborne says she served on The Second City’s artistic advisory board, founded in 2022, where she would routinely return to Toronto to foster rising talent.

“She would come back and have conversations with the talent here, and continue to mentor the next generation of artists,” says Osborne.

“She was still giving back to comedy, giving back to Canada, and giving back to The Second City. That’s a pretty special person.”