Comic O’Hara Gets ‘Beetlejuice’ Going

Catherine O’Hara said her favorite stories are about odd, unusual families.

Like her own.

“If I ever finally sit down to write a script, it would be about my family,” she said, gamely sampling a mound of cheese-and-chili-drenched French fries at a West Hollywood eatery. “We’re very close, but there’s this really emotionally up-and-down atmosphere that prevails whenever we’re together.

“My mom’s quite the powerhouse. So when she’s up, everyone’s up. And when she’s down, she takes everyone down with her. And my dad’s good at breaking the tension by cracking jokes, so there’s a huge amount of laughing and crying. In fact, you should see us. . . .”

O’Hara caught herself, running her hand through a shoulder-length mane of strawberry blond hair. “You know when my mom really gets mad?” the Toronto-born actress said with a laugh. “When I talk about the family. She says, ‘Catherine, if you tell another stupid story about this family. . . .’ ”

Maybe O’Hara’s sprawling clan is a bit quirky. She’s the second youngest of seven sisters and brothers--two of the latter run a Toronto pool hall and juice bar. But it would be hard to imagine a wackier household than the one in her latest film, “Beetlejuice.”

The surprise hit, which co-stars Geena Davis and Michael Keaton, features O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones as a pair of snobbish culture-vultures whose loony New Age pretentions arouse the ire of the former inhabitants of their house, a mischievous pair of ghosts. With talented young director Tim Burton at the helm, the movie not only has won laudatory reviews, but has grossed about $30 million in just three weeks of release.

Keaton has gotten raves for his showy title role as a deranged bio-exorcist, but O’Hara and Jones almost walk away with the film. As critic Peter Rainer put it: “They’re like a Creature Feature caricature of the modern up-scale bad marriage.”

(Exhausted after a busy day of nagging her husband and overseeing the transformation of her home into a gaudy shrine to Bad Taste, O’Hara’s character is the kind of gal who likes to pop a few Valiums and lull herself to sleep by watching professional wrestling.)

It’s the kind of part that could put O’Hara back on the Hollywood map. As Burton puts it: “Catherine’s so good, maybe too good. She works on levels that people don’t even know. I think she scares people because she operates at such high levels.”

Or maybe she sometimes scares herself. After once being dubbed “the funniest woman in television” for her brilliant seven-year stint as a regular in the “SCTV” comedy troupe, O’Hara virtually dropped out of sight. She made a couple of cable-TV appearances, boasted in Rolling Stone about how much she slept (“I’m really a slug”) and popped up--all too briefly--in the films “After Hours” and “Heartburn.”

As critic James Wolcott described her departure from “SCTV”: “O’Hara seems to have flitted off into the ether on a space-cadet sabbatical.”

To hear her admirers tell it, O’Hara’s career problem is that people don’t remember her, just her characters. Mention O’Hara’s name to Hollywood folk and you get a blank. But mention her memorable “SCTV” creations--Lola Heatherton, the unhinged Vegas chanteuse, or her dead-on spoof of Brooke Shields--and you get an immediate reaction.

“Oh, sure,” they say. “That gal is funny. Very funny!”

This praise is usually followed by an awkward pause, and a follow-up question: “So whatever happened to her?”

Catherine O’Hara lifted her eyebrows up a notch. “I really have wanted to work, but how many good parts have you seen for a woman who does comedy?” she asks. “Let’s face it, with most comedies, the female roles are very stereotyped.

“I always got offered these parts where the character would say to the guy, ‘Gee, you’re looking good. What’s your name?’ That’s the Hollywood woman’s part--the friend of the leading actor.” She flashed an impish grin. “I guess they need a woman--the only alternative would be having the male character just talking to himself.”

Watching O’Hara sample another cheese-drenched French fry, it’s hard to imagine why she hasn’t been deluged with offers. An engaging woman with a warm, self-deprecating sense of humor and a fondness for pool, she has an expressive face and a low-ego disposition that makes her perfectly suited to the demands of parody and comedy.

In fact, she’s funniest when telling tales about her own foibles--the best being her account of how she contracted--and conquered--a blushing disease.

“Who knows? All of a sudden, I started blushing all the time. My face would get all red, even when I wasn’t embarrassed. I was still doing ‘SCTV’ and I remember I’d be giving ideas in a brainstorming session and I’d get so red that one of our writers, Paul Flaherty, would point to a can of Coke and then to my face.”

O’Hara gently patted her cheeks. “Finally, I just decided to will it away.” To illustrate her point, she let her face drop, as if all the muscles had suddenly relaxed. “I’d say, ‘OK, Catherine. Relax. This is not happening. You have control.’ And somehow I made it stop.”

Despite these minor personal triumphs, O’Hara would be the first to admit that career ambitions have never been her strong point (even if she’s picked up one Hollywood tic--she won’t reveal her age).

She also recently relocated to Los Angeles, acknowledging good-naturedly that the move wasn’t entirely sparked by career ambition. “When it comes down to it,” she says, “a lot of it’s because I have a boyfriend out here.”

As fellow “SCTV” grad Dave Thomas memorably put it: “Catherine’s never packaged herself in a sleazy, commercial way. She won’t play a librarian who turns into a nymphomaniac.”

O’Hara admits she turned down plenty of roles after leaving “SCTV.” “Most of the offers I got were to do the work I’d already done,” she says. “I didn’t want to keep on repeating myself. The problem is that it’s very tough to get a shot at doing something else, especially when you’re not sure what ‘something else’ is.”

O’Hara credits her agent, Nancy Geller, as being “wonderful about fighting for roles for me.” She was also refreshingly candid about her disappointments.

“I really did want the Holly Hunter part in ‘Broadcast News’--I mean, what actress wouldn’t?” she says. “My first audition went great, but the second one didn’t go so well. So my agent really had to fight to get me back for a third one, which went great.”

O’Hara rolled her eyes. “Then I went back and did a terrible job the fourth time!” She groans. “I dunno. I shouldn’t even talk about stuff like that, especially after seeing what a great job Holly Hunter did.”

She shrugged. “You just have to learn how to handle rejection. You realize a part is just not meant to be--and you just have to learn not to take it personally.

“Unfortunately, the alternative is that you keep saying no to scripts, which really drains you. Because you get excited that someone has sent you a script, but then you read it and you don’t really like it and then you feel really bad, because you say--’What right do I have to say no, to be so cocky?’

“So I try to keep telling myself that I do have that right. That if you don’t treat yourself with respect, who will?”

If no one’s offering her great scripts, O’Hara realizes that her best alternative is to write her own, as she often did with “SCTV.” O’Hara dreamed up her classic Lola Heatherton character only after realizing it was the only way she’d ever earn a slot in “SCTV’s” popular “The Sammy Maudlin Show.”

However, she modestly refuses credit for Lola’s memorable line: “I want to bear your children.” “That was my brother’s,” she says, laughing. “He’d always say that when he was trying to pick up girls.”

So why isn’t O’Hara writing a film--with a great part for herself? “I know. I’m lazy. But I made myself a New Year’s resolution that I would write myself something really special.”

For a moment she seemed lost in thought. “Which means I have till December, right?”