The news of Catherine O’Hara’s sudden death at the age of 71 was shocking, but not in the way many surprise celebrity passings are. Often these moments are a time to reflect on the impression the performer made on us at the high-water mark of her career, but O’Hara never had a high-water mark because she never really had a lull. There’s no moment in her career you can point to and say, “That was Catherine O’Hara at her best,” because there was never a moment she wasn’t at her best, and there was never a moment when she seemed to have gone away or slipped from our sight or been supplanted or gotten tiresome. To say this is unusual, especially for a female comedy performer, is to understate in the extreme.
With the exception of her partner-in-madness on SCTV, Andrea Martin, and maybe Goldie Hawn, no comedienne has ever endured and thrived as Catherine O’Hara did. Who knows what more she could have done, given the fact that only a few months ago, we saw her do some of her best work on the Seth Rogen show The Studio, filmed when she was 70.
