Catherine O'Hara was posthumously honored by her peers at the 2026 Actor Awards on Sunday, March 1st. The beloved actress, who passed away on January 30th at the age of 71, received the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series award for her role as Patty Leigh in The Studio. Seth Rogen, the creator and star of the Apple TV series, accepted the award on O'Hara's behalf with an emotional speech that left the star-studded audience in tears.
"I was asked to assume the very sad honor of accepting this award on O'Hara's behalf," Rogen began. "I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, whom I know she respected so much. She was such a big fan of all of yours."
Rogen went on to praise O'Hara's generosity, kindness, and graciousness, emphasizing that she never minimized her own talents or ability to contribute to the work they were doing. "She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set," he said. "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% 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 further praised 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." He concluded his speech by urging everyone to share O'Hara's work with those who may not know her. "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."
He concluded, "We were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us."
O'Hara died on January 30th at the age of 71 after a brief illness. Her representative confirmed that she passed away from a pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer listed as the underlying cause. The actress was a five-time nominee at the awards ceremony where she was honored. Her first nomination came in 2011 for Temple Grandin, and she earned four nominations for Schitt's Creek between 2020 and 2021. In 2021, she and her castmates – which included Eugene Levy, Dan Levy, and Annie Murphy – won the award for Best Ensemble.
Last month, O'Hara's life was celebrated at a Catholic Mass held on Valentine's Day in Los Angeles. The service was held at St. Martin of Tours Church in Los Angeles, just over two weeks after her death. Actress Kelly Lynch shared a photo of the program from the service in an Instagram post on February 17th. "Rest in peace darling Catherine," Lynch wrote, before quoting a Raymond Carver poem. "And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."
