"Consider Marilyn Hack, the mediocre actress she played in the 2006 Christopher Guest comedy For Your Consideration. Marilyn, along with the rest of the cast of the film-within-a-film Home for Purim, becomes convinced that they will be nominated for Oscars. When she isn't, a news crew shows up at her house, catching her as she's throwing out the two bottles of liquor she's clearly just guzzled, first thing in the morning."
"I suppose you could call what ensues an episode of cringe comedy, as the Marilyn we meet in that scene is a pitiable figure she's plastered, slurring through a face immobilized by plastic surgery, whip-sawing between self-pity and bitter invective against the French actress who, in her view, stole her nomination. "Ooh-la-la," she murmurs, cradling the reporter's face. She turns away and starts toward her house, but then turns back, filled with the drunken confidence"
Catherine O'Hara repeatedly portrayed intoxicated women with a blend of precise observation and innate comic instincts. She created characters who were simultaneously painfully human and uproarious, exemplified by Marilyn Hack, a mediocre actress in For Your Consideration who, after guzzling liquor, confronts a news crew in a cringe-comedy moment that reveals both self-pity and bitter invective. O'Hara's performances combined slurred delivery, physical immobilization from plastic surgery, and exposed vulnerability. Her early SCTV work featured similarly compromised figures, most famously Lola Heatherton, a sendup of Vegas lounge singers so strung out she barely completed glitzy variety shows.
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