Nearly 32 years before her own death, Catherine O’Hara gave a eulogy at the funeral of John Candy that has been remembered as an emotional masterclass.
O’Hara, who died on Friday, January 30, was close friends with Candy, who died after suffering a heart attack in March 1994. The two were costars on the legendary Canadian sketch show SCTV and both later appeared in Home Alone.
Taking to the altar at St. Basil’s Church in Toronto on March 18, 1994, O’Hara remembered the larger-than-life Candy with the humor, wit and candor that defined O’Hara over her decades-long career.
“Who am I to be standing up here talking about John Candy?” she began. “I’ll tell you who I am. I’m one of the millions of people whose lives were touched and enriched by the life that was John Candy. I know you all have a story. You asked him for his autograph, and he stopped to ask you about you. You auditioned for Second City, and John watched you smiling, laughing. And though you didn’t get the job, you did get to walk away thinking, ‘What do they know? John Candy thinks I’m funny.’”
O’Hara remembered meeting Candy for the first time when she auditioned for Toronto’s Second City touring company in 1974.
“When I joined him in the main cast, he drove us all the way to Chicago to play their Second City stage,” O’Hara recalled. “I had a crush on him, of course, but he was deeply in love with [his wife, Rosemary]. So I got to be his friend, and I closed the Chicago bars with him, just to be with him. We did SCTV together. When we all tried to come up with opening credits that would somehow tell the audience exactly what we were trying with the show to say about TV, it was John who said, ‘Why don’t we just throw a bunch of TVs off a building?’”
O’Hara’s last opportunity to work with Candy was on Home Alone, which was released in November 1990.
“He could give them one day, so they took him for 17 hours of improvising,” she said. “John gave himself so completely to every role, big or small. Not just because we all came to expect it from him, but because he loved doing it. He really had fun.”
O’Hara said her “last claim to fame” about Candy was the fact that he died on her birthday, March 4.
“I realize when I think of John, it’s not in terms of details,” she explained. “I think of John in terms of the big picture. That is why we so mourn our loss, but we treasure it as well. John’s life had meaning. John had principles. He lived by them, he worked by them. He set an example in so many ways. He was a protector. He cared. If he felt you’d been wronged in any way, he’d risk everything to make it right. To make you know you were worth something, too.”
Candy’s filmography, O’Hara said, was “a safe haven for those of us who get overwhelmed by the sadness and troubles of this world.”
In closing, O’Hara called Candy “the patron said of laughter” and made a nod to her own mortality.
“God bless and keep his soul. I will miss him,” she said. “But I hope and pray to leave this world too some day and to have a place near God — as near as any other soul, with the exception of John Candy.”
O’Hara died at her home in Los Angeles “following a brief illness,” her agency, Creative Artists Agency, said in a statement to Us Weekly on Friday. She was 71.
