Catherine O’Hara’s costar Seth Rogen accepted the award on her behalf
Just one month after her death, Catherine O’Hara received a posthumous honor from her peers at the 2026 Actor Awards — a moment that left the audience visibly emotional and the industry reflecting on her remarkable legacy.
On Sunday, March 1, the actress, who died Jan. 30 at the age of 71, won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series for her role as Patty Leigh in The Studio.
Seth Rogen, who stars in and created the Apple TV series, accepted the award for O’Hara with an emotional speech as the star-studded audience shed tears.
“I was asked to assume the very sad honor of accepting this award on O’Hara’s behalf,” he began. “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.”
“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,” added Rogen.
“She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set,” Rogen continued. “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.”
He 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.”
“So I guess I’ll just leave you with this,” Rogen concluded, “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 Jan. 30 at 71. Her rep confirmed that O’Hara died “after a brief illness.” In February, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health confirmed O’Hara died after suffering from a pulmonary embolism, according to a death certificate. Rectal cancer was listed as the underlying cause of the embolism.
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, the church confirmed to PEOPLE, and took place just over two weeks after her death.
Actress Kelly Lynch shared a photo of the program from the service in an Instagram post on Feb. 17. “Rest in peace darling Catherine,” Lynch, 67, began the post, 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.”
