Actors Awards: Seth Rogen Pays Tribute As Catherine OâHara Wins Posthumous Honour for The Studio

Catherine O’Hara was honoured posthumously at the Actor Awards 2026. She won the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series for her role in The Studio and received a long standing ovation at the ceremony. This comes weeks after the actress passed away following a brief illness.  

O’Hara’s co-star Seth Rogen accepted the award on the late actress’ behalf and said, “I know she would have been honoured to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much – she was such big fans of all of yours.”

Rogen continued, “I obviously have been reflecting on the time I was fortunate enough to spend with her, working with her, and something that I’ve just been marvelling at 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. She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set. 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, an email that always was pretty similar, and 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.”

He further continued, “And 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 way, shape or form. I’ll just leave you with this: If you have people in your lives that don’t know her work, if there are kids in your lives or just people who are out of touch or stupid or something. Just show them O’Hara dancing to Harry Belafonte in Beetlejuice, show them O’Hara hurting her knee in Best in Show and doing that amazing thing where she hobbles around, and tell the people, as they’re laughing, that that’s Catherine O’Hara. And we were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generally shared her talents with us.”

Catherine O’Hara passed away at the age of 71 on January 30, 2026. Reports from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health state that her illness led to a pulmonary embolism. PEOPLE obtained the death certificate, which stated that the fatal embolism happened due to rectal cancer.