One of the later and less beloved Christopher Guest comedies featuring his troupe of peerless, often SCTV-related improvisers is For Your Consideration, a medium-funny savaging of Hollywood’s feverish awards-season prestige campaigning.

The film’s unquestionable highlight is Catherine O’Hara, playing an actor who gets a whisper of awards buzz for a schlocky, still-filming drama called Home for Purim, and slowly loses her mind with the knowledge that she could maybe, possibly be recognized by her peers. O’Hara, known for her distinctively brassy yet malleable trill of her voice and her frequently red hair, peels back her performer’s bravado to expose the frenzied need beneath it. She somehow plays the outsized beneath the regular-sized, as her Marilyn Hack goes from plugging-away workhorse to desperate striver. Unsurprisingly, O’Hara briefly generated awards buzz of her own for playing this part; even less surprisingly, an Oscar nomination was not forthcoming. It couldn’t be; otherwise, it might have marred O’Hara’s masterclass in how certain actors, especially those specializing in comedy, are destined to go under-recognized in their lifetimes.

The difference, of course, is that Marilyn Hack is depicted by O’Hara, with tragicomic precision, as a mediocrity. O’Hara, who passed away today at the age of 71, was not. She was exceptional, and within her reputation as a primarily comic actress, she possessed an extraordinary range. She was the best-case scenario of a performer trained in sketch comedy, able to slip into various characters and render them instantly vivid.

There are nonetheless signature roles and projects for O’Hara, in television and film. There was SCTV, for which she shared a writing Emmy, and her late-career renaissance brought about by her work as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, for which she won a leading actress in a comedy Emmy that pretty much the entire world agreed was richly deserved. In between those pillars, she was an in-demand character actor and constant TV guest star. She’s particularly indelible to generations of kids for playing the frazzled but ultimately dedicated mom in Home Alone and its sequel, serving as the true emotional heart of the original film. She stole scenes in eventual classics such as After Hours and The Paper, hits like Dick Tracy, bombs like Wyatt Earp, and countless comic and voiceover roles. But the two major film collaborations of her career were with her SCTV pal Guest and Tim Burton.

For Guest, O’Hara did flawless teamwork in his mostly mockumentary movies Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. Guffman and Consideration make for poetic but unsparing bookends; the former ends with O’Hara and her on-screen husband Fred Willard leaving small town Missouri to pursue work as film extras in Los Angeles, while Consideration finds O’Hara’s Marilyn butting up against the limitations of her career, with O’Hara doing a virtuosic bit of fake-plastic-surgery acting. Guest makes wonderful meta-text of O’Hara’s genuine dexterity as a performer; she plays a former folk singer in A Mighty Wind, whose breakup with her long-time partner (Eugene Levy) causes his mental breakdown. She’s also paired with Levy for Best in Show, where she’s also (believably) portrayed as more vivacious than her milquetoast beau. Despite the common ground her characters in the Guest films share, they aren’t just comic archetypes, but distinctive people.

Her characters with Burton are equally nuanced, no small feat in such stylized environments. The pair didn’t collaborate as frequently as Burton and Johnny Depp or Danny DeVito, but she was there for one of his biggest breakthroughs, playing artist Delia Deetz, mother to melancholy goth girl Lydia (Winona Ryder), in Beetlejuice, and new caretaker of a house haunted by its sweet-natured former occupants. O’Hara makes Delia somewhat villainous in her garish sculptures and house-wrecking postmodern tastes, as well as her lack of understanding for her daughter; she is also, unquestionably, the heroine of her own story. O’Hara satirizes art-world pretension without sacrificing her innate comic likability. You want to see what this confidently untalented woman gets up to, even as it seems natural for a pair of ghosts to take point on parenting her daughter.

She reteamed with Burton for his animation project The Nightmare Before Christmas, where she provided multiple voices, most notably for female lead Sally, a wistful, stitched-together ragdoll in love with Christmas-besotted Halloween planner Jack Skellington. Though Jack’s singing and speaking parts were divided between two performers, O’Hara did her own singing as Sally, and occasionally performed Sally’s Song in concert later in her career. Given the more clipped, brassy tone she was best-known for in comedies, her work as Sally, a soulful wallflower and twisted vine of yearning, is pretty stunning; you’d never guess it was her.

Both Burton movies were echoed later in her career: for Frankenweenie, Burton’s stop-motion animated adaptation of his own short film, O’Hara again provided multiple voices, equally adept at playing a caring mom and a character referred to only as “weird girl”. And for his 2024 legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, O’Hara reprised Delia Deetz – and made her, if anything, more endearing than ever as a still-talent-deficient-but-now-quite-successful artist who loses her husband, subsequently dies in an absurd snake accident, and searches the underworld for her beloved. It’s a perfect turn for O’Hara because she seemed so indefatigable; what other comic actor could be so funny grappling with her own literal mortality and deciding she has her own post-life goal to attain? It didn’t much matter that Burton no longer had the services of her former on-screen partner Jeffrey Jones; O’Hara made Delia as funny as ever and weirdly touching, too.

It may be a tough performance to rewatch in the coming days, now that O’Hara is actually gone, far too soon. Then again, maybe not; it’s difficult to watch just about any Catherine O’Hara performance, even the more serious ones, and not feel delighted by her presence. She made big, crazy, sometimes potentially abrasive characters such welcome company.