#BornThisDay: Actor, Catherine O’Hara

March 4, 1954– Catherine Anne O’Hara:

“The people who present themselves as normal and nice and good are often the scariest monsters in the world.”

In the rich, delightful, demented, awkwardly titled Schitt’s Creek, now in its third season, Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, two truly great comedy legends, have worked together on stage; in films like Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman (1996) Best Of Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003), and on television on SCTV. Though they don’t want to call it chemistry, both actors admit that their familiarity makes producing the Schitt’s Creek easy. O’Hara:

“Half the job is just hanging out together, so it’s really nice to be with good people who are always insanely talented.”

O’Hara, and clockwise: Eugene Levy, Annie Murphy, and Dan Levy

Levy and O’Hara play Johnny and Moira Rose, a video-store tycoon and his wife. With their two adult children, the Roses had to move out of their stately mansion after the video-stores tank, and they take up residence in a small-town of Schitt’s Creek which Johnny Rose purchased online as a joke. The show, from CBC (The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), presents the same sort of surreal, absurdist city-meets-country world as our American sitcom Green Acres (1965-1971), but with an added dash of digital age satire. It is quite popular at my house, most especially for the presence of O’Hara, who I would watch read the phonebook, if we still had phonebooks. I guess, she could read her contact list from her iPhone.

And, gosh almighty, can I tell you how I love Canada? I love the citizens of our neighbor to the north. Vancouver, British Columbia is one of my favorite places on our pretty spinning blue orb. The Husband and I chose to get married there on the 25th anniversary of being a couple, October 9, 2004.

I am zany for so many Canadians that have contributed to out popular culture: k.d.lang, Joni Mitchell, Ryan Gosling, Ryan Reynolds, Robert Goulet, Justin Bieber. Canada even elected that handsome 6’ 2’’ Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau (who I think is married to Jennifer Aniston, do I have that right?). But none are more loved by me than those great comic actors out of Canada: Jim Carrey, Dan Aykroyd, Margaret Atwood, Martin Short, the cast members of Kids In The Hall (1988- 1994) and especially SCTV (1976-1984) starring: Eugene Levy, John Candy, Harold Ramis and Rick Moranis. SCTV made all the difference for my being able to get through the 1970s and 1980s.

I only watch Schitt’s Creek after smoking a little pot, just as I did for my SCTV viewing back in the day. It is aired in the USA on something called the POP Network, channel 4 on the evil Comcast’s Portland lineup.

O’Hara and Levy are such an important part of why those Christopher Guest mockumentary films work so well: Waiting For Guffman, Best Of Show, A Mighty Wind (2003) and For Your Consideration (2006). If that wasn’t enough, O’Hara does such funny, terrific work in my favorite Scorsese flick, After Hours (1985), and she is beyond nutty in Beetlejuice (1988), and Warren Beatty’s Dick, Dick Tracey (1990) that is. Other films include Home Alone (1990), Orange County (2002), Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events (2004). O’Hara also had a swell story arc on one of my all-time favorite television series, gay writer Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under, back in the early aughts.

She is a favorite of director Christopher Guest and also Tim Burton who used her so affectively in Beetlejuice, Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Frankenweenie (2012).

O’ Hara brings depth to many a shallow character. Schitt’s Creek‘s Moira is an actor, an ex-soap star, who became a socialite, chairing major charity events around the world. She has the wildest wardrobe of anyone outside of Empire’s Cookie Lyon and a difficult to place American Eastern Atlantic/English accent. O’Hara really carries the show. Her constant deadpan threats of suicide (“I need a bathtub and a very long extension cord”) are as hilarious as they are relentless. Her harried asides are delivered with the sort of timing only a comic genius could pull off.

It is great fun watching O’Hara and Levy together. They seem even more inventive this season as the Rose family learns to settle into the town. The nice, normal people of Schitt’s Creek could have been portrayed as hillbillies, but they show that the real freaks are this formerly rich couple with their crazy careers, cellphone charms and the dozens of O’Hara’s wigs.

But, O’Hara always brings something so creative to her projects. She has added an extreme affectation for her Moira character that makes her so much funnier than she even needed to be. Her dry wit and trademark deadpan lends a surprising complexity to her crazy characters. She is a fearless actor. Her Cookie Guggelman Fleck in Best Of Show was a performance worthy of an Academy Award, or at least a Blue Ribbon. It is not easy to be talented actor playing a really terrible performer, so I have to name Waiting For Guffman as my favorite of her performances.

In 2014, Canada honored O’Hara with a postage stamp. That’s right, you can lick O’Hara! I wonder if the USPS would ever do that for me. I understand in our country you have to be dead to get a stamp, so, I am working on that.

For her role in the television film Temple Grandin (2010) O’Hara earned her nominations from the Emmy Award, Satellite Award, and the Screen Actors Guild Award. She has won an Emmy for SCTV, and National Board Of Review named her Best Supporting Actress for For Your Consideration and she received an Oscar nomination for Best Song for the title tune from A Mighty Wind.

If you are smart with your arithmetic, I’m not and have to use my fingers, she is celebrating her 63rd birthday today and she still looks smashing. O’Hara is one of those funny women who are also crazy beautiful. She really is the successor to Madeline Kahn. I feel she deserves status as a true Gay Icon.

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