Smash hit

“But that’s just your take on it, isn’t it?” counters O’Hara. “Everyone interprets the movie in their own way. I know all of us (in the Guest ensemble) seem to react in the same way, in that if you say that it’s a savage movie we all get defensive and go, ‘No! We’ve just seen the insanity of something and are trying to find a way to be funny about it.’ ” Anyway, adds the LA native and wife of the production designer Bo Welch (Men in Black), she’s far too close to the whole Hollywood thing to be able to satirise it properly. “I’m definitely part of it. It’s just humanity, and we are all ridiculous.”

Ironically, O’Hara occupies a better position than most from which to view the follies of Tinseltown. She was, after all, the undisputed queen of comedy when she retired suddenly in 1983 from the groundbreaking Canadian TV sketch show SCTV. The series, which began in 1976 and launched the careers of John Candy, Harold Ramis and a fellow Guest veteran, Eugene Levy, was shot in Ontario and syndicated right across North America. It was the only show that could ever challenge Saturday Night Live for the bragging rights to “Most Influential Comedy Series”. And it featured a bubbly and anarchic O’Hara playing genius comic creations like the sadomasochistic aerobics instructor nun, Sister Mary Innocent.

And still, right at her mobbedin-public-places peak, O’Hara simply quit. She says that it was an anticareer move, that she desperately wanted a personal life instead of success. She wanted to write too, and work in movies. But she quickly discovered that movie roles are highly proscriptive, especially for funny women. “You get to play the best friend!” she says, perplexed. “She’s kind of wacky, she dresses colourfully. It suddenly hit me. They’d send me all these scripts and it was like, ‘Best Friend? No! No! No!’ ” I ask her if she ever got round to writing her own movie.

“I’m still workin’ on it,” she says, before bursting into a loud paroxysm of self-deprecating laughter.

BACKGROUND

• For Your Consideration

• For Your Consideration - review from the London Film Festival

• The feast of St Hubbins

Nip 'n' tuck, no thank you

Catherine O'Hara's latest role parodies the Botox'd movie diva

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

But you’re a hard-working actress all the same, I offer, by way of compensation.

She screws up her face, as if to say, “Really?” Yes, I continue, glancing down at my notes, five movies in the last year alone! She reaches over and grabs my papers. She scans the titles.

“Brother Bear?!” she says, referring to the Disney cartoon. “That was, like, two days work! And (CG animated movie) Monster House? That was just a few days as well, and it was shot before last year. Over the Hedge too! All those voice jobs are, like, a day of work.”

She adds nonetheless that once she gets a job — be it cartoon or dramatic feature — she throws herself wholeheartedly into it.

But does she still enjoy it? “Look,” she says, deadpan for the first time. “I made a movie last year, called Penelope, where I got to give birth. It’s two weeks before my 52nd birthday and I’m giving birth! You know? There really is no other job like it!”

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