Catherine O'Hara's Best Movie Performance Is In This Absurd Mockumentary

In the spring of 2019, New York Magazine writer E. Alex Jung was lucky enough to sit down with Catherine O'Hara for an in-depth interview for Vulture. As the two discussed her decades-long career, O'Hara shared a fascinating revelation about her "character type," so to speak. "I think there's a bit of the sameness in a lot of the characters I do. I think there's a lot of ... insecure delusional," she shared. "And I say this a lot, but I love playing people who have no real sense of the impression they're making on anyone else."

O'Hara undersold herself dramatically here, and that fact is even clearer in the wake of the news that the Canadian actress passed away on January 30, 2026. Between "Beetlejuice," "Home Alone," "Schitt's Creek," and "The Studio," O'Hara was a rare talent whose career spanned generations ... but younger people who might only know her from those last two projects need to queue up "Best in Show," a beloved mockumentary which features O'Hara's all-time best performance.

To be honest, it was a tough call to declare O'Hara's performance as Cookie Fleck in this mockumentary about a dog show her "best," because all of her turns in Christopher Guest's largely improvised films are incredible. Her role as travel agent and amateur actor Sheila Albertson in "Waiting for Guffman" is extraordinarily funny, especially when she gets to play drunk. As Marilyn Hack in "For Your Consideration," a woman who's absolutely desperate for an Academy Award, O'Hara delivers a performance that's as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. That's not what I'm here to talk about, though. I'm here to talk about O'Hara's character in "Best in Show," whom you might know as ... Cookie? Cookie Guggleman?!

"Best in Show," like many of Christopher Guest's movies, works off of a loose script and lets the actors play in the writer-director's sandbox. This works perfectly for Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy as married couple Cookie and Gerry Fleck, who travel from Florida to Philadelphia and find themselves staying in a storage closet at the fictional Taft Hotel because they're out of money. Gerry, a man who literally has two left feet, often looks at Cookie like he can't believe such a beautiful woman would ever speak to him, let alone marry him. O'Hara plays with this dynamic perfectly, and the fact that O'Hara and Levy had been working together since their days on "SCTV" only strengthens their fictional on-screen bond.

The funniest part of this entire thing, though, is that Cookie, on an almost constant basis, keeps crossing paths with former lovers who just want to reminisce about all of the crazy intimate encounters they've had. (One guy tells Cookie he'd never "done it" on a rollercoaster before.) As all of them approach the gregarious, outgoing Cookie, they ask the same thing and use her maiden name: "Cookie? Cookie Guggleman?!" Watching Levy's Gerry get increasingly incensed by this situation is magnificent, but without question, the even funnier part of this is how much Cookie absolutely welcomes these interactions and encourages the men while Gerry not-so-slowly loses his mind.

In the hands of a lesser performer, this role might have been forgettable; Cookie mostly reacts to other people rather than driving the action. But there's one aspect where O'Hara takes center stage. I'll just call it "the walk."

In 2020, Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy both spoke to Vulture about "Best in Show" and what their long partnership with Christopher Guest was like ... and in the process, O'Hara revealed that one of the movie's funniest gags was her invention and part of her family's lore. Specifically, towards the end of "Best in Show," O'Hara, as Cookie, does the world's silliest pratfall and then starts walking in ... a way that nobody has ever walked before. Here's O'Hara's entire story about this legendary walk, because it needs to be explained in her own words:

"That was my dad's bit. He would walk ahead of us and do that walk, and we'd all laugh. I've got six brothers and sisters, and we all learned how to do it. But I got to do it in a movie. But yeah, I had to be out of the show, somehow, so that Gerry could show the dog. And the night before we were the arena, we'd shot that day, and we had a little meeting, Eugene, Chris and I. And they were talking about hurting yourself or falling, and I said, 'Okay, what if I do this?' And I walked away from them. And Chris said, 'Yes. Do that.'"

The rest, as they say, is history. The woman invented a silly walk. If that was her sole legacy, it would be enough. Cookie Fleck, née Guggleman, is one of the most delightful characters in cinematic history thanks to O'Hara, and it's her best cinematic role. You can watch it for yourself on HBO Max to honor her memory.