Born and raised in Toronto, O’Hara got her start when Second City came to town in the mid-1970s, as part of a comedy revolution then sweeping North America. Her contemporaries included Gilda Radner, John Candy, and Eugene Levy, with whom she’d continue to work for decades. While Saturday Night Live seized the zeitgeist south of the border, O’Hara joined the cast of its Canadian counterpart, SCTV. One standout character, the hard-living showgirl Lola Heatherton, set the stage for many over-the-top O’Hara artists to come.