There was barely a dry eye inside the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday night when Lisa Kudrow announced Catherine O'Hara's name. A month after her unexpected death, O'Hara won a posthumous award at the 32nd Actor Awards for her performance on The Studio. The room rose instantly. For an actress who spent more than fifty years making audiences laugh, it was a standing ovation she would never take.
Seth Rogen, her co-star and executive producer, accepted the award on her behalf and delivered an emotional tribute highlighting her talent, generosity, and behind-the-scenes contributions. "I was asked to assume the very sad honour of accepting this award on O'Hara's behalf," Rogen told the crowd. It was the kind of speech Hollywood rarely gets right: honest, specific, and free of the usual ceremonial gloss.
Rogen marvelled at O'Hara's "ability to be generous and kind and gracious, while never, ever minimising her own talents and her own ability to contribute to the work." He added: "She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day we were on set."
Rogen also revealed for the first time publicly that O'Hara would email him and executive producer Evan Goldberg almost every evening before a shooting day, with messages that always began: "Hello, I hope you'll consider the following." According to Rogen, her suggestions, "100 per cent of the time," made not just her character better, but the entire scene and the show as a whole. It was a detail that reframed O'Hara not merely as a performer, but as a quiet creative force behind one of the year's most acclaimed series.
A Career Measured in Decades
Catherine Anne O'Hara, who was born on 4 March 1954 and died on 30 January 2026, was a Canadian and American actress, comedian, and screenwriter whose career spanned over 50 years. She came to prominence in the sketch comedy series Second City Television (SCTV) from 1976 to 1984, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award.
O'Hara went on to star in films such as After Hours, Beetlejuice, and the first two Home Alone movies, in which she played the mother of Macaulay Culkin's character Kevin. Appearing opposite Eugene Levy, a frequent castmate from SCTV, O'Hara gained a career resurgence for her role as Moira Rose in the CBC sitcom Schitt's Creek from 2015 to 2020, earning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Series Musical or Comedy.
Her win for Schitt's Creek propelled her into other major roles, including parts in HBO's The Last of Us and Apple TV+'s The Studio, where she played a storied Hollywood executive pushed aside by her studio. It was, in hindsight, a fitting final act: a performer of enormous stature playing a character defined by her refusal to be diminished.
She was nominated for 10 Emmy Awards across her career and won twice, for best female actor in a comedy series in 2020 for Schitt's Creek and best writing in a variety series in 1982 for SCTV. She also received a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
The Award That Meant Most
Calling the moment a "very sad honour," Rogen shared a moving speech as the SAG-AFTRA crowd rose to its feet and applauded. The Netflix-streamed ceremony also panned to Jenna Ortega among the attendees, and the Wednesday star, who had been nominated in the same category alongside O'Hara after co-starring with her in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, could be seen wiping tears away.
O'Hara's win marked a poignant final chapter for one of comedy's most revered performers, coming in a race that, until recently, had appeared firmly in Jean Smart's hands. Smart had been widely projected to secure her fourth Actor Award for Hacks, while Kristen Wiig, Kathryn Hahn, and Jenna Ortega rounded out the category.
Later in the evening, The Studio also won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series, a result that confirmed the Apple TV+ series as the defining comedy of the awards season. For O'Hara, it was a double tribute: individual recognition for a virtuoso performance, and collective recognition for a show she helped shape from the inside.
Remembering Her Work
Rogen closed his speech with a direct appeal to audiences that felt less like an awards-night formality and more like a genuine instruction. "If you have people in your lives that don't know her work, show them O'Hara dancing to Harry Belafonte in Beetlejuice," he said. "Tell them that's Catherine O'Hara and we were lucky to live in a world where she shared her talents with us."
The cause of O'Hara's death was later revealed to be a pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer as the underlying cause. The oncologist who signed off on her death certificate indicated he had been treating O'Hara since March of last year and last saw her on 27 January. The news of her passing, described at the time by her representatives as following a brief illness, shocked an industry that had seen her working at the very peak of her powers just months earlier.
She and her husband Bo had last been photographed together at the Emmy Awards in September 2025, four months before her death, when the cast of The Studio accepted the Outstanding Comedy Series win. That night on stage, surrounded by her cast, would become one of her final public appearances.
For the actors who nominated and voted for her, Sunday's award carried a specific weight. The Actor Awards, unlike most industry prizes, are voted on solely by fellow performers. That O'Hara's peers chose her name, in the category's final count, speaks to something that goes beyond box office tallies or critical consensus. It speaks to how she made other actors feel on set: seen, elevated, and lucky to be in the room. That, perhaps, is the legacy Seth Rogen was really describing when he stood at that podium with an award that should have been hers to hold.