Catherine O’Hara is too gracious, too self-effacing—in short, too Canadian—to brag about the effect she has on people, but you don’t have to look far to find someone who’s happy to do it for her. Martin Short, for instance, remembers being mid-conversation with Tom Ford and Anjelica Huston at a small dinner party in Los Angeles a few years back when his friend Catherine came through the door. “Anjelica went completely still,” he says. “She said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, I’ve got to meet her, I’ve got to meet her.’ It was like Paul McCartney walking in in 1965.”

O’Hara’s devotees don’t just admire the arc of her career, they dote over all the tiny comedic choices—a character’s limp, say, or her drowsy scorn, or her melodramatic way of wilting to the floor—that have made the people the actor has played so specifically and generously alive. In Home Alone, her bright blue eyes flooded with horror on the plane just before she screamed one immortal word: “KEVIN!” In Beetlejuice, she bellowed “Day-O!” and then led her dinner guests in a supernaturally possessed dance number. In Christopher Guest’s comedies, she was the bent light bulb you could never look away from. Has anyone ever played drunk better than O’Hara did in Waiting for Guffman’s Chinese restaurant scene? Has anyone captured Hollywood egomaniacs in their full and obscene vulnerability more hilariously than she did in For Your Consideration, in which she played Marilyn Hack, an actor unhinged by her own Oscar buzz? “I didn’t get nominated,” screams Marilyn, while taking her trash to the curb one tragic morning. “Four out of five of those girls are going to lose. Big time. Way worse than me. I didn’t even get nominated, I’m not gonna lose. I’m not gonna lose!”

As for O’Hara’s latest tour de force in the dearly departed Schitt’s Creek? There is something uniquely triumphant about a breakout role—a love story, no less, for an actor who spent decades getting passed over for romantic leading roles—coming to a woman in her 60s. For six seasons, the comedy from the Pop network was the Little Canadian Engine That Could, finally hitting critical mass when it got picked up by Netflix in 2017. Schitt’s Creek gave O’Hara the chance to show us every glittering thing she can do. Her character, Moira Rose—former soap star, goddess of panache and despair, ineffectual mother, and beloved matriarch of a wealthy family reduced to nothing—is now a TV icon headed into history. “Networks down the line have pigeonholed or diminished the idea of what an older female character can be,” says Dan Levy, who created the show along with his father, Eugene. (Dan plays O’Hara’s son, Eugene her husband.) “So to be able to be a part of this moment for Catherine O’Hara at this point in her life and show the world that there is nothing sexier, nothing more hysterical than a woman over 50—that was the joy. Because you’re dealing with a caliber of actor who is so seasoned and so willing to make choices that are outside people’s comfort zones. I think that’s what Moira Rose is a result of: Catherine having the runway to go for it.”

One Tuesday in Los Angeles, the woman who inspires all this commotion swings open the glass doors of her home and steps out onto her cheetah-spotted doormat to greet me. O’Hara wears a simple white blouse and black cigarette AG jeans, her feet in children’s pinstripe socks and black loafers. She apologizes for the rain. The threat of the coronavirus is in the news but a month away from forcing us all apart, so in lieu of a handshake she suggests a hug. (Oh, simpler times.) Right away she starts preparing me for what she’s sure will be a disappointing conversation: “In person, I’m just, ‘Neat. Oh, awesome. Oh, lovely.’ And then I’ll go on forever telling long stories. I’m nowhere near as interesting as Moira.”

O’Hara, a nice Irish Catholic girl from Toronto, is more focused on celebrating life than on selling herself. Inside her house, red Christmas lights wrap around the balcony overlooking the pool—she never took them down because she figured they worked for Valentine’s Day too—and Chinese New Year lanterns sit in planters from a recent party. There are piles of green shamrock decorations on the kitchen counter, which O’Hara has pulled out of the garage in anticipation of St. Patrick’s Day. The white stone kitchen island is covered with bouquets of pink hydrangeas and hyacinths, as well as an enormous vase of white roses from Pop TV in honor of her 66th birthday, a day fans on Twitter loudly declared #CatherineOHaraDay. Schitt’s Creek may have ended, but O’Hara’s stock is at an all-time high, with industry trades placing her atop the “hot list” of actors in demand during pilot season. The actor shakes her head. “I don’t know what’s happening!” she says.

Suddenly, Hollywood is looking at her the way Anjelica Huston does.

She pours tea and arranges cookies on a plate. We sit in her large open kitchen in a nook by the windows. Jars of beautifully colored pencils rest on the table—she bought them in hopes of drawing again, though she hasn’t yet. At first, answers to questions about her life end with her cheerfully muttering more self-deprecations: “Blah, blah, blah, what am I even saying?” or “Feel free not to quote me and just write, ‘I think what she meant to say is….’ ”

O’Hara only truly relaxes, and gives herself over to memory and impersonation, when talking about others. O’Hara’s stories about growing up, the sixth of seven children in a family that loved to laugh, are told with immense love and care. Her eyes water briefly when talking about her parents, who died within 10 months of each other.

“My father was a beautiful, shy man,” she says. “He always said he would never meet anyone if it weren’t for my mom, because she would talk to anybody. But if we ever got down, he’d say, ‘Just say, I’m the greatest!’ ” She lowers her voice and pumps her fist like he told her to, laughing at the memory of her modest father, who worked a desk job for Canadian Pacific Railway, exhorting her to proclaim her worth. “My father told great jokes he brought home from the office and my mother imitated everybody. I like to think I’m a combination.”

The trajectory of O’Hara’s life changed forever when she was a teenager and her older brother started bringing his girlfriend, Gilda Radner, to dinner with the family. When Radner came over, says O’Hara, “my mom would definitely break out the good plates.” Inspired by Radner’s acceptance into the original Toronto cast of the musical Godspell, O’Hara auditioned as well. She got a callback but not, ultimately, a place in the show. “That’s okay, it’s fine, still bitter!” she jokes.

O’Hara did, however, get to observe the cast members backstage—Eugene Levy, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin, and Martin Short among them—and it lit a fire of possibility. She recalls seeing Short in Godspell for the first time (“I took the program home, and I remember kissing his picture because I thought he was so adorable”) and dating Levy very briefly years later: “I think we went out to breakfast once. I think we must have kissed. But nothing further because he was a gentleman and I’m a good Catholic girl.”

More than all that, she remembers Radner treating her like an adored younger sister. “She had me sleep over one night and then in the morning, we sat there at her little kitchen table with a pretty cloth,” says O’Hara. “We had tea and pumpernickel bread with cream cheese and cucumbers. You come from the suburbs—something like that is so cool and chic and exotic.” When O’Hara turned 17, Radner gifted her a book of 17 coupons bearing promises like “I’ll take you shopping” and “I’ll do your hair.” Still, the actor is quick to disabuse me of the notion that she must have been special to have been loved so well by her friend. “No, seriously, that wasn’t about me,” she says, shaking off the suggestion. “Every one of my family will have the same kind of stories. She was like that with everyone.”

Before long, O’Hara followed Radner to Toronto’s Second City improv troupe, serving initially as her friend’s understudy: “Gilda wore a lot of funny hats and glasses so I did the same.” She also watched Radner, who died in 1989, bring lovability to every role, no matter how absurd or deranged.

This, of course, is precisely what O’Hara has been doing for years. “Everyone has been in love with Catherine since she was 17,” says Short. “No one made me laugh like her onstage. And she always brought a humanity to her characters. They always had a bent reality, but they were never not kind.”

Toronto’s Second City troupe went on to do six seasons of the Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV. They’ve all stayed friends forever, and Martin Scorsese staged a reunion in 2018 to start shooting footage for an upcoming Netflix special. Lately they’ve been gathering around O’Hara’s island, working on new material and telling stories about beloved friends long gone, like Radner, John Candy, and Harold Ramis. Candy, who starred with O’Hara in Home Alone, died in 1994—on O’Hara’s birthday, as it happens. “Oh, it was terrible,” she says. “I got some mixed phone calls that day. ‘Happy birthday and oh my God.’ Yeah. I’ll always remember the day he died.”

A Canadian TV interviewer once asked Candy why his friend O’Hara didn’t work more often. Did she even want to be a star? “I don’t think Catherine wants to play the wife,” Candy said. He went on to describe how O’Hara turned down Beverly D’Angelo’s role in the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies “because she didn’t see the character.”

O’Hara left Canada for Hollywood in the late 1980s, not for her career but for love: She had fallen for production designer Bo Welch on the set of Beetlejuice. The couple married and raised two sons, now in their 20s, who are employed as a set dresser and in set construction. (Both sons worked on Schitt’s Creek, to give you a deeper sense of how dreamy the gig was for her.) “I know that doing SCTV really opened the doors,” O’Hara says of her first years in L.A. “Chris Columbus and John Hughes didn’t make me audition for the mom part in Home Alone. I met with them, and I guess I was close enough to the character, somehow—or they just ignored what I was like in the meeting and hired me anyway.” O’Hara remembers running into her costar Macaulay Culkin a few years ago: “I opened my arms and said, ‘Baby.’ ” Culkin called her Mom and fell into them.

O’Hara insists that, early on, she routinely flubbed auditions. She describes meeting with a Canadian network head about a comedy show and the executive asking if she did any characters: “I told him, ‘Oh yeah, lots. I do a woman who’s lost all her teeth and she talks really funny. And another woman who’s always mad at her husband so she’s got this kind of angry voice.’ ” She raps her head with her knuckles. “I described them—and bad descriptions too.”

Warming to the theme of her own screwups, O’Hara says that she was desperate to play the Holly Hunter role in Broadcast News—and that James L. Brooks called her after her first audition to tell her how amazing she was. After blowing the second audition, O’Hara wrote Brooks a letter. “I know how I blew it,” she told him. “Please let me go again.” So he called her in for a third audition and then a fourth with one of the stars, Albert Brooks, which seems to have been a disastrous chemical misfire. On the way out the door, O’Hara remembers James Brooks stopping her and asking, “What happened to you?”

The third and final entry in O’Hara’s tales of terror is the most adorable—and possibly the most revealing. She auditioned to play the wife in a Robert De Niro movie. The casting people asked her to read a scene set in bed, so O’Hara slid down in the chair trying to seem like she was lying down. She re-creates it for me on her kitchen chair, her chin tucked unflatteringly into her chest and her legs stretched out akimbo. “Really attractive, right?” Yes, it may have been a poor choice, but as Candy said: She didn’t actually want to play the wife.

We could have used a lot more of O’Hara over the years, but with Schitt’s Creek she gave us everything. The actor spent enough time at SCTV and in Christopher Guest’s improvised movies to make collaborating with Eugene and Dan Levy feel like a homecoming. “She was so sure of the boundaries of what the character would and wouldn’t do,” says Dan Levy. O’Hara came up with Moira’s vague, European-parlor accent, as well as her obsession with wigs. She also elevated the character’s grande-dame vocabulary into the stratosphere of absurdity with words like unasinous. “Unasinous is fun,” the actor says with a laugh. “It means ‘equally stupid.’ As in: A number of unasinous ideas have been put forward today.”

Most of all, O’Hara insisted that Moira and her husband, Johnny, played with such elegance by Eugene Levy, remain in love throughout the crisis that finds them owning, operating, and living in a shabby, forgotten motel in a town they once bought as a joke because of the name. Theirs is a deeply romantic story of a man thoroughly enchanted by his mercurial wife. Rewatching Schitt’s Creek now—as many have been doing for comfort and escape—Moira suddenly seems like all of us forced to live a terrifying new life that resembles nothing of our past one. Moira is unapologetic about hating every second of her new normal, even as she grows closer to her family and her better self. It’s hard to conceive of any other actor managing to make Moira as dear as she is outrageous.

When I ask O’Hara if she kept anything from Moira’s closet, she disappears into her bedroom for a minute and returns with a divine pair of black lace-up Givenchy platform booties in one hand and an armful of luxury draped over her other arm: the Michael Kors sequin shift that Moira wore to her son’s boyfriend’s coming-out party in season five, a Celine tuxedo, and a McQ Alexander McQueen coat. “And look at this dress!” she says fondly, holding a slinky above-the-knee item out in front of her. “Apparently, I love Givenchy. It’s really tight but in a good way. How many older women get to wear short dresses or skirts? I did, as Moira.”

In the days leading up to our visit, O’Hara admits that she felt a little adrift. “At one point last week I was feeling grouchy or something,” she says. “A little disturbed. Every once in a while it hits me.” This is the time of year she’d be leaving for Toronto to start anew on Schitt’s Creek. And now it’s done.

“I don’t see trying to top this,” says O’Hara. “How greedy can one person be? When I was growing up, my mom would say, ‘Every day, just be thankful for your health. Get up and be grateful that you’re awake. You’re here for another day.’ ”

It’s against O’Hara’s practical nature to fantasize about goals, but she admires the hell out of Melissa McCarthy (“She’s so funny and fearless and such a great actor”) and is riveted by Succession (“The actors and the writing are all so good. Everyone’s despicable but you love them one moment and the next they’re awful again”). Her plan for now is to write for herself. She won an Emmy for writing for SCTV, and if she’s going to work she wants to feel devoted. “When I do take a job, I work really, really hard,” she says. “I forget that I’m a wife, that I have a husband and kids. I’m completely there. I think talents are God-given and it’s your job to take care of them and share them with the right people and….” She stops and gives herself a magnificent eye roll. “Blah, blah, blah.”

Last year, O’Hara was nominated for her first lead actress in a comedy Emmy for Schitt’s Creek, and it was the first time a stylist dressed her for a red carpet. She and Eugene Levy were determined not to let her slip into the sweaty desperation of her For Your Consideration character. O’Hara wrote an acceptance speech just in case—she says when she’s nervous she can’t be trusted to remember her own name—but lost. True to form, she’s gracious about it: “The only thing I was bummed about was that I didn’t get to do my bit, which I thought was funny. I swear, it’s not about not getting the award. It’s, ‘Oh, I had such a good bit.’ ”

Before we say goodbye, I beg her to share the bit with me. She looks horrified and waves her hands. “You can’t share a bit,” she says. “It’s bad form—and it could still be usable. In case I get another chance.”

WIGS STYLED BY ANA SORYS; PROPS STYLED BY ANTHONY A. ALTOMARE; FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS

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