Catherine O’Hara was posthumously awarded for her performance in The Studio at the 2026 Actor Awards on Sunday, with her co-star, Seth Rogen, accepting the honor on her behalf with a moving speech.
O’Hara, who died on 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 Apple TV comedy.
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“I was asked to assume the very sad honor of accepting this award on O’Hara’s behalf,” Rogen began his acceptance speech for his late co-star. “I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much.”
“I obviously have been reflecting on the time I was fortunate enough to spend with her and working with her,” continued the actor, who is also the series’ co-creator, “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.”
“She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set,” Rogen reflected, adding that “pretty much every evening” before O’Hara was set to shoot, she would offer up some suggestions for the following day’s script.
“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,” Rogen revealed. “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.”
“She really showed that you can be a genius and be kind, and one of the things does not have to come at the expense of the other in any way, shape or form,” he continued.
Rogen concluded by asking the audience to share O’Hara’s work with the people in their lives, from her “dancing to Harry Belafonte in Beetlejuice” to her “hurting her knee in Best in Show and doing that amazing thing where she hobbles around,” and to tell them, “as they are laughing, that that’s Catherine O’Hara.”
“We were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us,” he said.
O’Hara died on Jan. 30 of a pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer as the underlying cause. Last month, the actress’ life was honored during a Catholic service held at St. Martin of Tours Church in Los Angeles.
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