Catherine O’Hara has won the Actor Award for Female Actor in a Comedy Series, weeks after her death at the age of 71.
O’Hara received the posthumous award for her work in The Studio, the Apple TV+ Hollywood satire led by Seth Rogen. She played Patty Leigh, a former studio head and mentor to Rogen’s character Matt Remick.
Rogen accepted the award on her behalf, delivering a heartfelt speech while many of those in the audience were brought to tears.
“I’ve been given the sad honor of accepting this award on O’Hara’s behalf,” said Rogen. “I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much. She was such big fans of all of yours.
“I, obviously, have been reflecting on the time I was fortunate enough to spend with her, working with her, and something that I’ve just been marveling at over the last few weeks was really her ability to be generous and kind, while never ever minimizing her own ability to contribute to the work that we were doing. She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set.”
Rogen added that O’Hara would frequently propose revisions to her scripts for The Studio, saying: “I haven’t said this to the other actors, because I didn’t want them to get ideas, but pretty much every evening before she had a shooting day on our show, she would email me and [co-creator] Evan an email that always was pretty similar. It said: ‘Hello, I hope you’ll consider the following…’ and then there would be a completely rewritten version of the scene she was in.
“And literally, 100% of the time, it made not just her character better, but it made the scene better and the entire show better as a whole. She really showed that you can be a genius and be kind, and one of those things does not have to come at the expense of the other in any way, shape or form.
“So I guess I’ll just leave you with this. If you have people in your lives that don’t know her work, if there are kids in your lives, or just people who are out of touch or stupid or something, just show them O’Hara dancing to Harry Belafonte in Beetlejuice. Show them O’Hara hurting her knee in Best in Show, doing that amazing thing where she hobbles around, and tell the people, as they are laughing, that that’s Catherine O’Hara and we were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us. Thank you.”
It was reported last month that O’Hara’s immediate cause of death was a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in her heart. Rectal cancer was listed as the underlying cause.
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Although she played a wide variety of characters in a career that spanned five decades, she was perhaps best known for playing mothers. She played Macaulay Culkin’s character Kevin’s mother, Kate McCallister, in the first two Home Alone films — spawning the viral “Kevin!” meme — before going on to play matriarch Moira Rose in hit TV series Schitt’s Creek.
