Moira Rose taught us how to fall apart with dignity. Catherine O’Hara taught us how to build a career that peaks at 66. She started as a waitress at Second City Toronto. The director told her to keep waitressing. She replaced Gilda Radner anyway. For 50 years she played women who couldn’t see themselves clearly, and she loved every one of them. Delia Deetz, the worst artist alive, convinced she was a genius. Kate McCallister, who forgot her kid at Christmas and spent two movies trying to get back to him. Cookie Fleck, whose romantic history kept showing up at dog shows. Then Eugene Levy called. He’d created a show with his son about a rich family who loses everything. Would she play the mother? A former soap star who copes with poverty by refusing to acknowledge it? She almost said no. Thank God she didn’t. Moira Rose wore wigs that had their own ambitions. She spoke in an accent from nowhere. She called her children “bébé” like it contained the entire history of motherhood. And underneath all of it, O’Hara let us see the terror of a woman who had never learned who she was without an audience. When Moira finally broke, in hospital rooms and at weddings and rehearsing for community theater, O’Hara showed us what she’d known all along: the performance was the protection. The delusion was the survival mechanism. She won the Emmy at 66. In her speech, she thanked the Levys for letting her “fully be her ridiculous self.” Last year, someone asked which role she wanted to be remembered for. “Mother to my children.” She was 71. She left behind her husband Bo, her sons Matthew and Luke, and millions of us who learned from Moira Rose that you can lose everything and still refuse to be diminished by it. Bébé, we’ll miss you.