Saturday Evening Dwell paid tribute to former host Catherine O’Hara following her demise at age 71.
The NBC sketch comedy present aired a throwback bumper that includes O’Hara alongside a lower-third of her identify in the course of the stay present on Saturday, January 31, which featured visitor host Alexander Skarsgård and musical visitor Cardi B.
A spokesperson for O’Hara confirmed to Us Weekly on Friday, January 30, that she’d died following a “temporary sickness” and {that a} “personal celebration of life can be held by the household.” Per a Los Angeles Hearth Division spokesperson, paramedics transported O’Hara to an area hospital in “severe situation” on Friday — and PageSix reported that she’d beforehand complained of getting “bother respiratory.”
O’Hara had a novel place in Saturday Evening Dwell’s historical past regardless that she was by no means formally a solid member. As a result of her success on Canada’s groundbreaking sketch present SCTV, SNL government producer Dick Ebersol tried to rent O’Hara in early 1981 when he took over the present.
Whereas there have been tales about O’Hara being scared off by notoriously unstable SNL head author Michael O’Donoghueshe dismissed these rumors as “B.S.” throughout a 2024 interview with Individuals. As an alternative, O’Hara revealed that she determined in opposition to taking a job at SNL out of loyalty to SCTV.
“Our producer would get a cope with a community, and we’d have a present for a season or two, after which that deal would go away. There’d be a break, then we’d do the present once more,” she defined. “I bought requested to be on Saturday Evening Dwell. And naturally I stated sure. Who doesn’t need to try this?’”
Nevertheless, O’Hara in the end backed out of a possible place within the Saturday Evening Dwell season 6 solid alongside Eddie Murphy when SCTV was picked up for an additional season.
“Yeah, not cool to take a job and go away it. You already know what I imply?” she admitted, earlier than including, “All of it labored out the best way it was speculated to.”
That call actually labored out for O’Hara as a result of she received her first Emmy Award for Excellent Writing for a Selection Sequence in 1982 for her work on SCTV. (O’Hara acquired her second Emmy almost 40 years later, this time within the Excellent Lead Actress in a Comedy Sequence class for Schitt’s Creek.)
O’Hara did finally host Saturday Evening Dwell on two events, first in April 1991 after which once more on Halloween evening in 1992.
She solid a legacy as certainly one of Canada’s most profitable comedy exports with starring roles in Dwelling Alone, Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Earlier than Christmas and Greatest in Present. In 2025, she acquired Emmy nominations in each drama and comedy classes for her work on The Final of Us and The Studiorespectively.
O’Hara was reportedly filming the second season of Apple TV+’s The Studio till shortly earlier than her demise.
Catherine O’Hara mirrored on feeling “fortunate” to be alive two years earlier than her demise. “I’m fortunate (I get) to maintain doing issues like this at my age — I can’t consider it,” O’Hara instructed Elle Canada in August 2024, selling her look in that 12 months’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. “Over the previous few years, once I’ve gotten (…)
“Actually don’t know what to say,” The Studio cocreator Seth Rogen admitted by way of Instagram on Friday. “I instructed O’Hara once I first met her I assumed she was the funniest particular person I’d ever had the pleasure of watching on display. Dwelling Alone was the film that made me need to make films.”
Rogen, 43, went on, “Attending to work together with her was a real honour. She was hysterical, form, intuitive, beneficiant… she made me need to make our present adequate to be worthy of her presence in it. That is simply devastating. We’re all fortunate we bought to stay in a world together with her in it.”
A lot of O’Hara’s contemporaries and followers — together with The Final of Us costar Pedro Pascal, Dwelling Alone castmate Macaulay Culkincomic Amy Schumer and late-night host Andy Cohen — have all shared their very own remembrances of the comedy icon since information broke of her demise on Friday.
Saturday Evening Dwell airs on NBC Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET.