Actress and comedian Catherine O'Hara received a posthumous honour from her colleagues at the 2026 Actor Awards. She passed away on January 30 at the age of 71.
The actress won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series on Sunday, March 1, for her portrayal of Patty Leigh in The Studio.
Seth Rogen, who both developed and stars in the Apple TV series, gave an emotional statement to accept the prize for O'Hara, leaving the audience in tears.
He started his speech saying, "I was asked to assume the very sad honor of accepting this award on O’Hara’s behalf. I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much. She was such big fans of all of yours."
Seth continued, "I obviously have been reflecting on the time I was fortunate enough to spend with her and working with her, and something that I’ve just been marveling at over the last few weeks was was really her ability to be generous and kind and gracious, while never, ever minimizing her own talents and her own ability to contribute to the work that we were doing."
He further noted, "She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set."
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"I haven’t said this to the other actors because I didn’t want them to get ideas, but pretty much every evening before she had a shooting day on our show, she would email me and Evan [Goldberg] an email that always was pretty similar. It said, 'Hello, I hope you’ll consider the following.' And then there would be a completely rewritten version of the scene she was in, and literally 100 percent of the time, it made not just her character better, but it made the scene better and the entire show better as a whole," Rogen continued.
He further complimented O'Hara for exemplifying "that you can be a genius and be kind, and one of those things does not have to come at the expense of the other in any way, shape or form."
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Seth concluded his speech, "So I guess I’ll just leave you with this - if you have people in your lives that don’t know her work, if there are kids in your lives or just people who are out of touch or stupid or something, just show them O’Hara dancing to Harry Belafonte in Beetlejuice. Show them O’Hara hurting her knee in Best in Show and doing that amazing thing where she hobbles around and tells the people, as they are laughing, that that’s Catherine O’Hara. We were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us."
About Catherine O'Hara
Catherine O'Hara passed away on January 30, 2026. She was 71. According to her representative, O'Hara passed away "after a brief illness." According to a death certificate issued by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health in February, O'Hara passed away following a pulmonary embolism. The underlying cause of the embolism was identified as rectal cancer.
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The actress received recognition at the awards event after being nominated five times. Between 2020 and 2021, she received four nominations for Schitt's Creek after receiving her first in 2011 for Temple Grandin.
She and her co-stars, Annie Murphy, Eugene Levy, and Dan Levy, took home the Best Ensemble prize in 2021.
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