It seems impossible to hate John Candy, the big-hearted comic-actor best known for his string of charismatic film roles in the 1980s and early 1990s—from Stripes to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to Uncle Buck. Sadly, he died in 1994, at the young age of 43, following a heart attack. But with a tear-jerking eulogy delivered during a memorial service in Toronto, close friend and collaborator Catherine O’Hara surveyed just how much life he packed into those four decades.
O’Hara had immense love for her fellow Canadian, with whom she worked on the sketch series SCTV, as part of the Second City Toronto improv troupe, and in the blockbuster film Home Alone. But she opened the nine-minute speech by summarizing all of the ways he “enriched” other people’s worlds, including so many small acts of kindness.
“I know you all have a story,” she says in the clip. “You asked him for his autograph, and he stopped to ask you about you. You auditioned for Second City, and John watched you smiling, laughing. And though you didn’t get the job, you did get to walk away thinking, ‘What do they know? John Candy thinks I’m funny.’ You walked behind John to communion. You carried his bags up to his hotel room, and he said, ‘Hey, that’s too heavy. Let me get that for you.’ And then he tipped you. Or was that a day’s pay?…you caught a John Candy scene on TV one night, right when you needed to laugh more than anything in the world.”
Meeting John Candy
O’Hara also shares her own story of meeting Candy in 1974, when he was director of the Second City touring company.
“When I joined him in the main cast, he drove us all the way to Chicago to play their Second City stage,” O’Hara recalls. “And I had a crush on him, of course, but he was deeply in love with [his wife, Rosemary]. So I got to be his friend, and I closed the Chicago bars with him, just to be with him. We did SCTV together. When we all tried to come up with opening credits that would somehow tell the audience exactly what we were trying with the show to say about TV, it was John who said, ‘Why don’t we just throw a bunch of TVs off a building?’”
The whole eulogy is filled with lovely details, as O’Hara reflects on Candy’s graciousness, his collaborative spirit, and the overall sparkle of his comedy.
“His movies are a safe haven for those of us who get overwhelmed by the sadness and troubles of this world,” she says. “As if he knew he’d be leaving us soon, John left us a library of fun to remember him by.”
And she ends with a moving note to illustrate their closeness: “God bless, dear John, our patron saint of laughter. God bless and keep his soul. I will miss him. But I hope and pray to leave this world too some day and to have a place near God—as near as any other soul, with the exception of John Candy.”
The Candy legacy
After the eulogy video resurfaced on Reddit, dozens of fans shared their emotions.
“I was eight years old when he passed, and to this day no celebrity death has ever hit me harder,” one user wrote. “How could such a bright light be gone so early? She’s right, his films are a safe haven for the soft-hearted. RIP.” Another added, “John Candy died over 30 years ago, but it still stings like it was yesterday. He left such an incredible and rare cultural mark.”
Candy—the subject of an upcoming Amazon Prime documentary, John Candy: I Like Me—had an immense influence on the comedy world. Conan O’Brien has talked frequently about how much he loved the SCTV star; he once talked to Howard Stern about his impactful meeting with Candy back in 1984, when O’Brien was a 21-year-old student at Harvard University (and president of the Harvard Lampoon).
“We ended up hanging out,” O’Brien recalled, “and what I remember most clearly is that he was everything I wanted him to be. He was John Candy.”
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