'Kind' Catherine O'Hara Honored by Seth Rogen as She Posthumously Wins at 2026 Actor Awards 1 Month After Her Sudden Death

Catherine O'Hara posthumously won Best Female Actor in a Comedy Series at the 2026 Actor Awards on Sunday, March 1.

In an emotional moment, the star-studded crowd rose to their feet as her The Studio costar Seth Rogen went to the stage to give a speech and accept the award on her behalf, as O'Hara passed away at age 71 on January 30.

"I was asked to assume the very sad honor of accepting this award on O'Hara's behalf. I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much," the comedian began. "She was such big fans of all of yours."

"I obviously have been reflecting on the time I was fortunate enough to spend with her and working with her. Something I've been marveling at the past few weeks was 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 we were doing," Rogen continued. "She knew she could destroy and she wanted to destroy every day on set."

The actor went on to share a funny anecdote that he admitted he never told their other costars "because I didn't want them to get ideas."

"But every evening before she had a shooting day on her show, she would email me and Evan [Goldberg] and would say, 'Hello, I hope you consider the following,' and there was a completely rewritten version of the scene she was in," he revealed. "100 percent of the time, it made her character and the scene better and the entire show better as a whole."

"She showed you can be a genius and be kind, and one of those things does not have to come at the expense of the other, shape or form," he said.

"I will leave you with this: if you have people in your lives that don't know her work, that are kids or out of touch or stupid, show them O'Hara dancing to "Belafante" in Beetlejuice, doing that amazing thing where she hobbles around in Best in Show, that is Catherine O'Hara," he concluded. "We were lucky to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us."

As OK! reported, the legendary actress died of a blood clot in her lungs, with the official report listing her cause of death as an pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer being named as an underlying cause.

The star had not publicly disclosed her cancer diagnosis before her passing.