Chapter 1The Sixth Child

Foreword

I have spent my working life in the midcentury. The studio-trained actors, the repertory stages, the television that arrived in the front rooms of Britain and America in the 1950s and reorganized both countries around it — that has been my beat at The Guardian and at Sight & Sound for long enough that editors stopped asking whether I wanted the assignment and simply assumed the period. So when I told colleagues I was writing a book about Catherine O'Hara — a Canadian sketch comedian, born in 1954, whose defining work ran from a Toronto improvisational stage in the 1970s to a streaming-era sitcom that ended in 2020 — the response was polite and consistent. She was a fine subject, they meant, for somebody else. She was not my period.

She was, in fact, the best reader my period ever had.

The thing that brought me to her was a voice. The accent Catherine O'Hara constructed for Moira Rose — the transatlantic, unplaceable, over-articulated instrument that six seasons of Schitt's Creek made one of the most recognizable sounds in contemporary television — is built out of the vocal style of the 1940s studio system, the diction of actors trained to project into unamplified houses through characters somewhat larger than life. I had spent decades writing about the people who spoke that way because they had been taught to. Here was a woman who had reconstructed the sound from the outside, half a century later, so precisely that linguists could describe its mechanics without ever locating its origin. Whoever built that voice had studied my period more closely than most of the scholars I know, and had declined, characteristically, to show her working. I wanted to know how the voice was made. That question turned out to be the question of the whole life.

The research was not what I expected, and the difficulty was instructive. O'Hara did not give the profiles. She did not maintain the confessional relationship with the press that most figures of her prominence sustain, and so the record I worked from was the public one: the published interviews, sparse and carefully bounded; the press and trade archives of fifty years; the tributes and obituaries of January 2026; and above all the recordings themselves, which is where she put everything she declined to say elsewhere. I expected to be writing about comedy. I found myself writing about construction — about fifteen-page private biographies for characters whose histories would never reach the screen, about a wig collection that functioned as an autobiography, about an improvisational freedom that turned out to be the product of more preparation, not less.

What I found underneath the construction was a dinner table. The sixth of seven children in an Irish-Catholic Toronto household learns early that attention in a crowded room is earned by precision rather than volume — by timing the entry, by becoming the aunt or the radio announcer rather than describing them. Everything that followed, from the coat check at the Toronto Second City to the Emmy stage in 2020, is legible as the elaboration of that first education. The midcentury I cover produced its performers through institutions: the studios, the conservatoires, the repertory circuits. O'Hara was produced by a table that seated nine, and the table turned out to be as rigorous as any of them.

Why a book, then, about a woman who so plainly preferred that the books be about her characters? Because the career is an argument, and arguments deserve to be laid out. Across fifty years she demonstrated that character comedy is not the lesser form beside leading-role stardom but a different and more demanding one — a practice of sustained construction whose recognition accumulates rather than crystallizes. She died while the culture was still working out what to call what she had done. This book is my attempt at the accounting: to follow the method from the crowded end of that Toronto table to the invented voice at the end, and to treat the work with the seriousness she never once requested for it.

I came to her as a partisan of another period. I leave persuaded that she belonged to it more truly than most of its natives — that she was the last great graduate of a school she never attended. The good subjects do that. They redraw the map you brought with you.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · The Sixth Child

The house was on Glencairn Avenue in the Lawrence Park neighborhood of Toronto, a north-end district that, in the 1950s, was filling rapidly with the families that the postwar Canadian economy had been producing at a pace the country had never previously sustained. Marcus Charles O'Hara, born in 1916, was the son of Irish immigrants who had arrived in Toronto in the 1880s. He worked at the Steel Company of Canada in Hamilton, a daily commute by car west along the Queen Elizabeth Way, ninety minutes each direction depending on the weather. His position was middle-management. He was a courteous man with an Irish-Canadian face and an Irish-Canadian disposition: amiable on the surface, with the layer of withholding beneath that the second-generation Catholic immigrant household typically organized itself around.

Margaret O'Hara, née Meehan, was Marcus's wife of more than a decade by the time Catherine arrived. She was the household's organizational center. She had been raised in the same Irish-Canadian Toronto Catholic environment as Marcus. She had not worked outside the home across the marriage. By the spring of 1954, she had been pregnant or recovering from pregnancy or breastfeeding for substantially the entire decade. Catherine would be the sixth of her seven children.

Her older siblings, in order of seniority, included Marcus O'Hara, the eldest, named for his father, who was the household's de facto second adult by the time Catherine arrived; Mary Margaret O'Hara, older than Catherine, the sister who would develop across the subsequent decades her own substantial artistic identity (the cult 1988 album Miss America, which would establish her as one of the most-respected experimental-vocal singer-songwriters of the post-punk Toronto scene); and the other brothers and sisters whose ages clustered between Marcus and the youngest. They would be, by Catherine's subsequent characterization in the few interviews where she discussed family, the cohort of older siblings who effectively ran the household across the decade in which Catherine was among the youngest.

Catherine Anne O'Hara was born on March 4, 1954, in Toronto, the sixth of seven children. She was, by the family's subsequent characterization across the years, the comic of the bunch.

The order of birth in a household of seven children is itself a kind of personality-formation engine. The eldest is the responsible one. The middle is the diplomatic one. The younger children learn, very early, that the way to attention in a room of older and louder voices is not to speak louder but to speak smarter: to time the entry, to place the sentence at the precise moment in the existing conversation where it will produce the maximum unexpected effect. Catherine, near the bottom of that order — the second-youngest of the seven — learned the lesson as thoroughly as anyone in the house, by the unanimous testimony of those who knew her in the household and at school across the subsequent two decades.

The Catholicism in the household was the standard Irish-Canadian Catholicism of the 1950s and 1960s, the kind that was not so much theology as it was a complete social architecture. Mass on Sundays at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church on Avenue Road. The crucifix in the kitchen. The Marian image in the front hall. The schools the children attended (Holy Rosary primary school on Alcina Avenue, and Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute later). The familiarity with the priest, the catechism, the rosary, the saint's days. The understanding, transmitted by the household's complete cultural environment rather than by any explicit theological instruction, that the Catholic Church was the structure within which life was organized and that defection from the Church was equivalent to defection from the family itself.

Catherine, by her subsequent acknowledgment in the few interviews where the topic came up, never defected. She continued to identify as Catholic across her entire adult life, even as her professional environment in Toronto and Los Angeles became substantially secular. She did not attend Mass weekly in her later years. But she did not stop being Catholic in the cultural-and-identity sense that the Irish-Canadian Catholic upbringing had conditioned her to inhabit.

The first comedy Catherine performed was, by every account that has surfaced, the comedy of the dinner table.

The O'Hara dinner table seated nine. Marcus at the head. Margaret at the foot. The seven children along the sides, arranged loosely by age. The dinner was the household's daily summit, the moment at which all the subterranean political dynamics of the day, the school grievances, the sibling rivalries, the parental disappointments, were brought to the surface and adjudicated under the formal procedure of the meal.

Catherine, near the bottom of the order, learned the shape of the table by sitting at the foot of it for years before she was permitted to speak. She watched the older siblings deploy their material. She watched Marcus's straight-man elder-brother register, the calm authority of the eleven-year-older. She watched Mary Margaret's musical sensibility. Even in childhood, Mary Margaret would phrase her sentences as if they were melodic lines, with rhythm and inflection that the rest of the family would absorb without being able to articulate. She watched the middle siblings (the three brothers and the sister who clustered between Marcus and the two youngest) develop their respective styles: the wisecracker, the storyteller, the contrarian, the negotiator.

By the time Catherine was old enough to participate in the dinner-table comedy at the age of about five or six, she had already acquired the ear that would define her professional career. She knew where the gaps were. She knew the rhythm of the conversation. She knew when a particular kind of intervention (an imitation of an aunt, a deadpan observation about the dinner's menu, a sudden shift into the voice of a public figure she had heard on the radio that day) would produce the maximum laughter from the audience of older siblings and parents.

The household recognized her, in the way that families recognize the talent of a particular child without quite having the vocabulary for what they are seeing. The brothers and sisters were funny. Catherine was something else: she did not perform a character so much as become it. She was the one who became other people, and the family's subsequent treatment of her organized itself around that observation, even when no one in the house had yet found the words to name it.

The schools were Holy Rosary, then Burnhamthorpe. The Catholic-school environment of Toronto in the 1960s was the standard one for the household: rigorous in academic instruction, conservative in social attitude, structured around the familiar Catholic-school rituals of the morning prayer, the noon Angelus, the dismissal blessing.

Catherine was, by her teachers' subsequent recollections, an attentive but not exceptional student. Her grades were satisfactory. Her behavior was good. She did not stand out as a comic performer in the school environment in the way she would later stand out professionally. The home was where she performed; the school was where she observed.

What she observed at school, across the years from Holy Rosary through Burnhamthorpe, was the social architecture of girlhood in the 1960s Toronto Catholic environment. The cliques. The hierarchies. The romantic entanglements that began in the late grades of primary school and ramified through high school into the substantial preoccupations of every female student in the cohort. The gestures and inflections and physical mannerisms of the girls who, by virtue of being slightly more confident or slightly more conventionally attractive or slightly more socially organized, occupied the central positions in the school's social ecosystem.

Catherine, herself peripheral in that ecosystem (not central, not bullied, not invisible, simply present at the edges), watched. She watched the girls who organized the cliques. She watched the girls who were excluded. She watched the girls who, like her, sat at the table and observed without participating. She built, by the end of high school, an extensive mental library of female types from which she would, across her subsequent comedy career, draw the gallery of characters that would define her professional identity.

The composite gallery of female types that would emerge in her SCTV years — Lola Heatherton's lounge-singer affect, Dusty Towne's brassy adult-cabaret swagger, the Brooke Shields parody and its broader satire of constructed celebrity femininity — was anchored in the cumulative observational catalog she had been building across her adolescent years at Burnhamthorpe and across the broader Toronto-Catholic-Irish-Canadian social environment that surrounded the household.

She was, by the time of her 1974 graduation from high school, a character actor in formation. She had not yet performed publicly for any audience beyond the dinner table and the occasional school skit. But she had built the inventory.

Mary Margaret

The sibling relationship that would prove the most consequential for Catherine's artistic development was not with Marcus the eldest, who organized the household and provided the practical encouragement that led her toward Second City in 1974, but with Mary Margaret — the older sister who was already conducting her own investigation of what sound could do.

Mary Margaret O'Hara would develop, across the subsequent decades, one of the more remarkable careers in Canadian music: her 1988 album Miss America, released on Virgin Records, was received by critics as a singular work that defied categorization — part art-song, part jazz vocal, part post-punk experiment, its treatment of the human voice as an instrument capable of entirely new forms of expression placing it in a lineage that ran through Nina Simone and Meredith Monk more naturally than through any pop tradition. The album has aged into the kind of canonical status that work achieves when it is too strange for its immediate moment and too good to be forgotten. Miss America would remain her only full-length studio album; her later releases were EPs, soundtrack contributions, and collaborations with other artists.

In the Glencairn house of the late 1950s and 1960s, the two O'Hara sisters were not separated by aesthetic ambition. They were children. Mary Margaret's musical sensibility was already visible — the family's oral tradition has her singing before she could speak clearly, organizing the household's music in ways that registered to the adults as precocity and to Catherine as simply the way Mary Margaret did things. What the proximity gave Catherine was an early education in the relationship between performance and meaning: the recognition that sound organized in deliberate ways could do things to a room, could alter the emotional atmosphere, could make people feel things they had not been feeling before. Mary Margaret did this with pitch and rhythm. Catherine would do it with character and timing. The underlying instinct was the same.

The sisters attended the same schools, competed for the same parental attention in the middle-child positions the family's size produced, and developed alongside each other the particular dynamic of siblings who are close in age and different in method: the musician and the comedian, the melodic and the structural, each observing the other's approach to the central problem of how you make a room feel something.

The Radio and the Television

Toronto in the 1950s and early 1960s was a CBC city. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's English-language radio network had been the country's primary entertainment and information infrastructure since the 1930s, and the CBC's Toronto production complex on Jarvis Street was the center of that infrastructure. What the household received through the radio across Catherine's childhood was a particular version of Canadian cultural life: the CBC Radio drama productions, the comedy programs, the variety shows, the news and public-affairs programs that organized English Canada's understanding of itself.

The radio comedy tradition that the CBC sustained was the one Catherine absorbed first. Don Messer and His Islanders, the maritime-country music program that her parents listened to on Friday evenings. Wayne and Shuster, the Canadian comedy duo of Frank Shuster and Johnny Wayne, who had been performing together since 1941 and who by the 1950s and 1960s occupied a position in English Canada roughly equivalent to Bob Hope's position in American entertainment: ubiquitous, broadly loved, technically accomplished, their comedy built on classical literary parody and the wordplay tradition that both Shuster and Wayne had developed through their University of Toronto education. The Wayne and Shuster sketches — their Shakespeare parodies, their Roman Empire comedies, their detective-fiction pastiches — were constructed with a craft that the young Catherine registered as the sound of comedy made by people who understood what they were doing.

The household acquired a television in 1959, when Catherine was five. The television arrived as a significant domestic event — a new object in the front room, organized around the chair that Marcus had established as his viewing chair, with the children arranged on the floor or on the sofa according to the viewing hierarchy the family had rapidly developed. The American network programming that came through the Toronto CBC and CTV affiliates in the late 1950s and early 1960s — The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jack Benny Program, I Love Lucy in reruns, The Bob Hope Show — was the comedy curriculum that the television provided alongside the Canadian material.

Lucy was the particular one. Lucille Ball's distinctive brand of physical-comedy commitment — the absolute seriousness with which the Lucy Ricardo character inhabited each situation, however absurd, the absence of any winking acknowledgment to the audience that she knew the situation was preposterous — was the working model that Catherine, at five and six and seven years old, was absorbing without knowing she was absorbing it. Lucy never told you the situation was funny. Lucy simply inhabited it, and the inhabiting was what produced the comedy. The lesson was the fundamental lesson of character comedy, and the household television was delivering it in thirty-minute installments to a child who had no vocabulary for what she was learning but an extremely good ear for how it worked.

The Post-High-School Decision

The post-high-school decision was the first significant divergence from the standard trajectory of the Burnhamthorpe Collegiate graduating class of 1974.

The standard trajectory was: a year of secretarial school or community college, then employment in one of the office-and-administrative positions that the Toronto economy of the early 1970s was generating in substantial volume, then marriage, then the full transition into the household-management role that the Catholic-Irish-Canadian template had been organizing women into for the prior several generations. Catherine's older sisters, including Mary Margaret, had largely followed variants of this trajectory. The household assumption was that Catherine would too.

She did not.

She had no formal theatrical training, and she did not seek any. What she had was the dinner-table education — nearly two decades of watching, of building an observational library, of learning how a room's attention is earned by precision rather than volume — and a family already connected to the city's small, informal comedy world. Her older brother Marcus was a fixture of the Toronto arts-and-nightlife scene; her sister Mary Margaret was pursuing music. The path Catherine found was not the theater school but the working stage.

In 1974 she took a job at the Second City in Toronto, the improvisational-comedy theater that had opened downtown the year before. She began not as a performer but at the edges of the operation — waiting tables, working the coat check — the way people without credentials or connections often begin in the businesses they mean to enter. What she had was proximity: she was in the building night after night, watching the resident company build and test material, absorbing the methodology from the position of the staff rather than the stage.

The opportunity, when it came, came the way opportunities come in small institutions — through an absence that needed filling. Gilda Radner, one of the company's central performers, left in 1974 for the National Lampoon operation in New York and, soon after, for Saturday Night Live. O'Hara, who had been understudying and watching the material take shape from the wings for months, stepped into the roles Radner had been playing. Andrew Alexander, who ran the Toronto Second City, would recall that she took over the parts with a speed and agility that startled the company: she was, almost at once, not a replacement but a principal.

She was twenty years old. She had had no formal training. What she had was the twenty-year observational apprenticeship of the younger end of a seven-child table — the ear, the inventory, the capacity for becoming other people — and it turned out to be exactly the preparation the improvisational stage required. She was Catholic and Toronto and Irish-Canadian, and she was going to spend her professional life becoming other people, because that was what she had always done at the dinner table and that was what she did not want to stop doing.

She did not return to the trajectory the household had assumed for her.

The next chapter takes up the Second City years.