While Canadian comedy legend John Candy died just over 30 years ago, his larger than life persona and work are still so prominent in Canadians’ collective consciousness that it almost feels as if he’s still with us.
Candy was born on Oct. 31, 1950 in Toronto to a Catholic working class family of English and Polish descent.
After some small acting roles in plays, Candy was selected to join the cast of Second City Toronto in 1972. The improv group would later land a television show out of Edmonton called Second City Television, better known as SCTV.
Out of the modest studio at 5325 Allard Way, Candy and cast mates Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis and Joe Flaherty just to name a few, would create some of the most iconic sketch-comedy in the history of the medium.
Despite starting a year after their American counterpart Saturday Night Live, it was SCTV that was often the more sought after show by performers in New York, for its unique characters and intellectual wit.
Candy would be on and off the show during the early eighties to take on film roles, starring alongside Bill Murray in the 1981 comedy Stripes, before becoming a Hollywood mainstay in late eighties and nineties.
Candy had a run of comedies that cemented his status as a titan of the genre, who could easily star alongside the likes of Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Dan Akroyd and Chevy Chase in movies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Spaceballs, The Great Outdoors and Canadian Bacon.
But there was something different about Candy that separated him from his other comedic compatriots, and that was his big heart and contagious warmth. He carried with him an aura of endearing kindness everywhere he went.
He played the lovable everyman, except Candy was playing himself.
Unlike so many other Hollywood household names, as a father of two, he put family first.
“He was the best dad,” Candy’s daughter Jennifer told TODAY.com. “He’d say, ‘Don’t worry what people think about you. Just be your authentic self.'”
“The other thing about my dad is that he was the ultimate family guy,” she continued. “That’s the reason he didn’t want to do ‘Saturday Night Live’. He knew the lifestyle wasn’t going to be healthy for him. He was smart in that way.”
Director Jon Turteltaub worked with Candy on the 1993 comedy Cool Runnings, where Candy played a bobsledding coach to an unlikely Jamaica national bobsleigh team, loosely based on the true story where the actual team did compete in the 1998 Winter Olympics.
“When you were with John, he did something very few brilliantly funny and famous people do: He laughed at other people’s jokes,” Turteltaub said. “That’s actually a big deal. He made people feel welcome. He made people feel wanted.”
He never let his success go to his head, even after he bought the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts with Wayne Greztky and Bruce McNall in 1991. It’s worth mentioning that the Argo’s took home the Grey Cup that same year.
Stories like that make one wistful for a bygone era of Toronto.
Perhaps the most endearing story of what it was like to be in the company of Candy comes from friend Eugene Levy, who in an interview with the Hudson Union Society recanted what a typical dinner was like with the Uncle Buck star.
“In the early years in Toronto, we used to go to John’s for dinner, he would say ‘come over, were gonna have dinner.’” recalled Levy. “We’d get there at seven o’clock and we’d have some cocktails and then chit chat and have some laughs, and then there were more cocktails and then more laughs and more cocktails.”
“It’s now about ten o’clock…and I notice he’d be putting a big turkey in the oven. I said ‘John, how many pounds is that bird?’ He’d say, ‘Oh I don’t know ten, twelve pounds it’s nothing.’ I’d say, ‘Doesn’t it take a while, like forty minutes a pound?’ ‘No, no, no, it’ll be fine.’ We always ate at two in the morning. Always. It always happened, we never ate before midnight, never,” said Levy.
It was Candy’s way of keeping everyone around, laughing with cocktails, in a warm room on a cold Toronto night.
He died of a heart attack March 4, 1994 while shooting a film in Mexico. Candy is buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
