The misstep that nearly cost this actor her Hollywood career
An early career misstep didn’t stop the 70-year-old actor from becoming a huge star and a fan favourite.
Though she had established herself as one of the stars of Toronto’s iconic improvisational comedy troupe The Second City, and stepped into the limelight-adjacent as an understudy to the legendary Gilda Radner, Catherine O’Hara’s Hollywood story begins in a rental car, in the pre-mobile phone era.
“I’m so glad that we didn’t go further than a date or two,” she says of her frequent comedy collaborator, Eugene Levy.Credit: Contour by Getty Images
It was 1988, in Los Angeles’ hot, dry San Fernando Valley, and our star-in-the-making was on her way to Warner Brothers to audition for a role in a film named Beetlejuice, directed by another legend, Tim Burton. But minutes turned to hours, and hours turned into streets and neighbourhoods that didn’t look like Hollywood.
“After driving forever I was thinking, I don’t know who this guy is, but he can’t be in showbusiness because his office is far out,” O’Hara says, laughing. Eventually, she pulled her rental car to the side of the road, called her agent from a payphone and realised she was hopelessly lost.
When she finally found her way back to the Warner Bros lot, she was directed to the bungalow that served as Burton’s office, but found the door locked and a note pinned to it. The note said: “I’m sorry. I waited as long as I could.” In that moment, in a town infamous for long commutes and legerdemain directions, O’Hara’s conquest of Hollywood had gone off the rails.
The good news is, this story has a very happy ending. O’Hara and Burton eventually connected, and one of the film’s most memorable roles, sculptor and eccentric conceptual artist Delia Deetz was hers. “I just remember sitting with Tim and laughing and telling stories. He’s got a great sense of humour,” O’Hara says.
O’Hara’s experience with Burton was sublime. “Tim directs by osmosis, it’s like he’s saying things and telling you things, and he’s not telling you what to do, but you get it,” O’Hara says. “He totally gets what he wants out of you in his original way, his completely original way.”
“The best directors are manipulators; gentle, loving manipulators, and he is,” O’Hara adds. “That first Beetlejuice set was just so loose and fun and silly and exciting and creative, and Tim wanted to get that back, and he did.”
“It really changed my life...I met all the wonderful people, Tim and everybody, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, and then Bo, of course.”
Beetlejuice, which starred Michael Keaton as the charismatic “bio-exorcist” Betelgeuse, became a smash hit. O’Hara followed it with roles in Home Alone and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and, collaborating with writer/director Christopher Guest, and actor Eugene Levy, roles in Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration.
But Beetlejuice somehow endured in the culture. A sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, reuniting O’Hara, now 70, and Keaton, is coming out. The original film also endured in O’Hara’s life: it was where she met her husband, production designer Bo Welch, while working on the film.
“It really changed my life,” O’Hara says. “I met all the wonderful people, Tim and everybody, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, and then Bo, of course. We’re still married, thank goodness, but I don’t know, it was just fortunate.
“So many people have such fond memories of the time that they first saw Beetlejuice, and it’s just carried all this positivity all around it,” she adds. “My little story of meeting Bo, it really did change a lot in my life.”
“I feel fortunate that anybody knows me as anything, that I’m in people’s lives somehow, their childhoods,” O’Hara says.Credit: Contour by Getty Images
In a sense, too, Beetlejuice laid the groundwork for one of O’Hara’s most potent creative threads, playing eccentric and beautifully unpredictable (sometimes neurotic) women. In one mad and memorable scene from the original Beetlejuice, Delia declares: “I must express myself. If you don’t let me gut out this house and make it my own, I will go insane, and I will take you with me.”
In hindsight, in that performance, it’s hard not to see threads of what would become her most memorable career role, Moira Rose, the soap opera star wife of Johnny Rose and mother of their children David and Alexis, in Schitt’s Creek. More so when you realise that Delia’s line was not in the original script, but was added by O’Hara, who came from a background of improvisational theatre.
“It’s definitely something in me that that keeps coming out,” O’Hara says. “I just love that idea of, it’s sad but funny, believing you have something and no one seems to get it, no one seems to get how much potential you have, no matter how many opportunities you’re given.
“I don’t have that desperate need. I don’t even have a social network. I don’t need followers.”
“The first time you see Delia in the second Beetlejuice is at her art gallery show, and we had a full gallery set up in Soho in London. It was amazing. With a real program, with my work, sculptures, my body, because the work is about my body.”
So, then, to understand the difference between all the women in the room, if Moira and Delia are both women who crave followers, is O’Hara is a woman who doesn’t?
“I’ve been very fortunate in my work. I don’t feel like, ‘Oh, if only people could see me, if only they knew how talented I could be’,” she says. “I don’t have that desperate need. I don’t even have a social network. I don’t need followers.
“They’re definitely the same person, they’re definitely related,” O’Hara says of Delia and Moira. “Moira was way more confident. Definitely confident in her relationship with her husband, too. That’s really grounding. I think they had a real solid love, and she grew to love her kids. She’d missed out, but she got a second chance. She’s very lucky that way.
“Delia is less secure, I think, just as a human being,” O’Hara adds. “I don’t know what her upbringing was, but yeah, I think both of them, the money is new to them. They did not grow up with money, and they want to be seen.”
Which brings us to perhaps the greatest collaboration of O’Hara’s career, with actor Eugene Levy. On screen they have played a multitude of strange and wonderful couples, from Gerry and Cookie Fleck in Best in Show, to Mickey and Mitch in A Mighty Wind.
The relationships are plainly milked for comedy, but they are also incredibly tender. What makes them so specific is that there is never an absence of love in the room.
“I remember at the beginning of Schitt’s Creek, it was sort of written to be a little more of a hard-ass funny, but hard-ass, smart-ass wife, and giving Johnny a lot of heat for the situation that they’re in,” O’Hara says.
“It felt like it’s negative and it doesn’t go anywhere, and what happens to that? Does it grow? Do you grow out of it? And without talking about it, we just both naturally went the way of having a solid relationship. And I think that grounded us as a family.
“Eugene and I both take the comedy really seriously,” O’Hara adds. “We like to have it grounded in reality, and sometimes the reality is drama, right? The drama in life. And they’re in a terrible situation and they really have lost touch with their kids. They barely know them. But to have something solid there, I think grounded that family.”
O’Hara describes Levy as “a lovely gentleman, and he really is, and he’s a good man, and he’s got a cool wife. And he’s a very loving father, and maybe you can’t go any other way with him. I don’t know, maybe it’s him.”
Hilariously, they almost dated when they first met. “Oh, we tried. Everybody tried,” O’Hara says, laughing. “I’m so grateful that we didn’t go further than a date or two. I don’t believe we’d have the relationship we have, the working relationship.
“I see him rarely when we’re not working. He’s like family that way, where when you’re together, you’re instantly together again,” she adds. “I’m very happy it didn’t work out with Eugene and me. We both have our spouses that we’re happy with, thanks.”
While she is not a woman of a thousand faces, O’Hara does have in her repertoire some of television and film’s most memorable mothers. There is Delia. And Moira. And the role that still gives her a high level of on-the-street recognition – Kate McCallister, from Home Alone.
While it might be said that Kate was not the best mother – she did, after all, somehow leave a child behind when the family embarked on their now iconic Christmas vacation – she is still somehow beloved by generations.
“I feel fortunate that anybody knows me as anything, that I’m in people’s lives somehow, their childhoods,” O’Hara says. “That’s the best, to be part of holiday ritual of watching Home Alone or Nightmare Before Christmas, or I just feel honestly, really fortunate.
“I love doing characters. I’m most nervous when I have to be myself. I have to speak as myself. I once spoke at a nursery school. They asked different parents to talk, and I tried to speak about the school that my kids went to, and I got heckled.
“But to go out in the world and be on a bus or subway or at the airport, listen to bits of conversations. That just is endlessly entertaining,” she says. “You take those few lines of dialogue and imagine the rest. To still have an opportunity to do that and to work with people who are open to collaboration, I’m spoiled. It’s the only way I can work.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will be released in cinemas nationally on September 5.