Never would it have occurred to me that the 71-year-old actress, most recently seen by me in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the TV show The Studio, would be at death's door. But here I am, having to memorialize a wonderful presence in our comedy lives gone way before her time.
I guess she wasn't at death's door, really, as she succumbed to what Wikipedia is calling a brief illness. Those kinds of illness are worrisome as they can get any of us, even those who looked like they were still going to keep making us laugh for years into the future.
It's another blow to the Christopher Guest mockumentary cinematic universe after the loss of Rob Reiner. After Reiner stopped making movies like that but Guest continued, Guest cast O'Hara in Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and (unfortunately in this last case) For Your Consideration. She was great in all but one of those, and along with collaborators like Eugene Levy -- later her collaborator on the wonderful series Schitt's Creek -- and Fred Willard, she became synonymous with Guest's engaging brand of improvisational comedy.
Of course, to more mainstream comedy fans, she took the scene by storm with her roles in Beetlejuice and Home Alone. Neither of those are personal favorites, though I do like both quite a bit. O'Hara was adept at pleasing both comedy nerds and a broader audience, always making particular choices with her character work, and always being very, very funny.
I always associated O'Hara in my mind with Madeline Kahn, as if a baton had been handed off by Kahn and O'Hara picked it up and ran with it. There are a dearth of actresses whose primary mode is comedy who get to have such long careers, which is a shame. (Just looking it up now, I realize we lost Kahn at only age 57, to cancer.)
In looking back at a career that goes all the way back to 1980 -- yes that's a 45-year career, unheard of for most actresses -- I'm seeing I've already listed the films and TV shows that I think are the major touchpoints for most of us. But O'Hara made anything she was in better, often showing up in key supporting roles as comic relief rather than needing to operate as the lead. Maybe that was a key to her longevity, that she needn't be the thing the movie was selling you on. She was the thing that always put a big smile on your face when she appeared.
And certainly she wasn't limited to this sort of role, but she was so good at playing a character with a quick wit and perhaps slightly questionable priorities, but someone you always ended up rooting for, even if it was only because it was O'Hara playing her.
It's a huge loss at a time when we've had too many of them.
Rest in peace.
