Key Highlights
- It’s always, We need silly goof-off girls.” O’Hara’s gripe, relayed with a wide, warm smile, seemed to stem not from self-pity but from genuine befuddlement; what she was doing on “SCTV” was acting, insomuch as it involved inhabiting characters with such conviction that she more or less disappeared completely into the work.
- O’Hara, a self-professed “good Catholic girl at heart,” was a natural at the art of sublimation; she had an almost ascetic impulse to vacate her own gentle personality in order to serve as a vessel for whatever eccentric, delusional, hammy weirdos might speak through her.
- She was nothing like Lola Heatherton, her oblivious, preening lounge-singer character on “SCTV”—who once began an interview with Mother Teresa by asking, “What do you get out of this?”—but there was never a sense that she stood in judgment of Lola’s delusions of grandeur.
- She approached even her most insufferable characters with compassionate curiosity; they came from within her, but she also couldn’t wait to see what they were going to do next.
- She once told Rolling Stone, “When I pretend to be someone else, I go to the depths of nothingness.
