The 2026 Actor Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA honored Catherine O’Hara‘s enduring legacy in comedy.
The late actress won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series for The Studio during the Sunday, March 1, awards show at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles.
“I was asked to assume the very sad honor of accepting this award on [Catherine] O’Hara’s behalf,” Seth Rogen shared after O’Hara received a standing ovation inside the venue. “I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much. She was such a big fan of all of yours.”
The other nominees in O’Hara’s category were her Studio costar Kathryn Hahn, Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega, Hacks’ Jean Smart and Palm Royale’s Kristen Wiig.
“I obviously have been reflecting on the time I was fortunate to have spent with her and working with her,” Rogen shared during the unique acceptance speech. “Something I’ve been marveling over the last few weeks 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.”
Rogen continued, “She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set.”
O’Hara and her Studio costars were also nominated for Ensemble in a Comedy Series, competing against the casts of Abbott Elementary, The Bear, Hacks and Only Murders in the Building.
While honoring the late actress, Rogen recalled a few emails he received from his costar while shooting The Studio.
“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,” Rogen said as the audience laughed. “Literally, 100 percent of the time. It made not just her character better, but it made the scene better and the entire show better. She really showed that you can be a genius and be kind, and one of those things does not have to come at the expense of the other in any shape or form.”
Before walking away from the stage, Rogen urged viewers of multiple generations to admire O’Hara’s long body of work.
He shared, “We were lucky to live in a world where she shared her talents with us.”
O’Hara learned of her Actor Awards nods just weeks before her January 30 death at age 71.
Us Weekly confirmed that O’Hara died following “a brief illness.” Paramedics were called to her Brentwood, California, home at 4:48 a.m. on January 30 for a medical aid call, and she was transported to the hospital in “serious condition,” a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson told Us.
According to an L.A. County Department of Public Health report obtained by TMZ in February, O’Hara’s immediate cause of death was listed as a pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer as the underlying cause.
Four months before her death, O’Hara attended the 2025 Primetime Emmy Awards with her costars from The Studio in September. She was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Patty Leigh on The Studio but lost the category to Hannah Einbinder from Hacks.
O’Hara subsequently skipped the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globe Awards with her castmates in January despite The Studio’s nominations.
Rogen — the star and cocreator of The Studio — paid tribute to O’Hara shortly after news of her death.
“Really don’t know what to say,” he wrote via Instagram in January. “I told O’Hara when I first met her I thought she was the funniest person I’d ever had the pleasure of watching on screen. Home Alone was the movie that made me want to make movies.”
He continued, “Getting to work with her was a true honor. She was hysterical, kind, intuitive, generous … she made me want to make our show good enough to be worthy of her presence in it. This is just devastating. We’re all lucky we got to live in a world with her in it.”
Rogen later honored O’Hara while accepting Best Comedy Series Director at the DGA Awards in February.
“It was an honor to get to direct her every day and we worked very hard to make the show good enough to warrant her time and her presence,” he said. “So, ultimately, we would like to thank the DGA for this, but we would mostly like to thank Catherine O’Hara for being such a wonderful person and for blessing us with your presence.”
O’Hara is survived by her husband, Bo Welch, and their sons, Matthew and Luke.
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