Seth Rogen accepted a posthumous Actor Award win for Catherine O’Hara after the late actress triumphed at last night’s (March 1) awards.
The star won Female Actor in a Comedy Series for her turn in Apple TV’s The Studio, which is co-created and co-stars Rogen.
O’Hara died in January, aged 71, due to a pulmonary embolism with an underlying cause of rectal cancer, leading to an outpouring of tributes, including from Rogen, who called her an “utter genius”.
The star was given the posthumous gong at the Actor Awards ceremony for her performance as fictional former studio head Patty Leigh, with Rogen walking up to accept the statuette.
“I know she would have been honoured to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much,” he said. “She was such big fans of all of yours.
“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 marvelling at over the last few weeks 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.
“She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set.”
Revealing an anecdote from her time filming that he hadn’t told the “other actors” as he “didn’t want them to get ideas”, Rogen shared: “Pretty much every evening before she had a shooting day on our show, she would email me and [co-creator] Evan [Goldberg] an email that always was pretty similar, and 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,” he continued. “And she really showed 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.”
“So I guess I’ll just leave you with this,” he concluded. “If you have people in your lives that don’t know her work, if they’re 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 and Beetlejuice, show them O’Hara hurting her knee in Best in Show and doing that amazing thing where she hobbles around, and tell the people, as they are laughing, that that’s Catherine O’Hara, and we were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us.”
As well as The Studio last year, O’Hara was well known for starring in the Home Alone series, comedy show Schitt’s Creek and recently The Last Of Us.
Home Alone co-star Macaulay Culkin shared a moving tribute to her in the wake of her death, writing “Mama. I thought we had time.”
The Studio was among the big winners at the Actor Awards, also taking home Ensemble in a Comedy Series and Male Actor in a Comedy Series for Rogen.
Sinners proved triumphant on the film side, winning Cast in a Motion Picture and Male Actor in a Leading Role for Michael B. Jordan, while Jessie Buckley won Female Actor in a Leading role for Hamnet, and Sean Penn and Amy Madigan won supporting gongs for One Battle After Another and Weapons, respectively.