One big revelation from my more than three years of researching and writing a new biography, John Candy: A Life in Comedy, is that my subject was more than just a uniquely gifted and acclaimed comedic actor. John Candy was a great actor, full stop. In fact, many of those who knew him and worked with him remain steadfast, 31 years after his death, in their belief that he may have eventually earned an Oscar for a dramatic role, had he lived past the age of 43.
It was in this light that I finally came to appreciate the depth of Candy’s performance in the 1991 dramedy Only the Lonely, produced by John Hughes and written and directed by Hughes’s protégé Chris Columbus. In my conversations with Columbus, and with many of the others involved in the production, it became clear that Candy poured all of his acquired dramatic skills into the character of Danny Muldoon, an emotionally late-blooming Chicago cop trying to pursue a romantic relationship while still living under the roof of a domineering mother, played by Maureen O’Hara, who later raved to Johnny Carson, with almost maternal pride, about working with John “the actor.”
The director Oliver Stone also spoke of Candy’s serious skill during the making of his 1991 conspiracy drama, JFK. In press interviews for the film, Stone made note of Candy’s commitment to perfecting both the dialect and tone for his depiction of Dean Andrews Jr.
Candy, who was Canadian, rose to fame as a member of Toronto’s Second City, eventually starring in Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Uncle Buck; Home Alone; and Cool Runnings. Yet during my research, I discovered a litany of unmade dramatic films that Candy had been, at one time or another, attached to. He outright rejected an offer to play the lead role in what he felt was a demeaning biopic of controversial comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, in the same way that he felt 1989’s Wired had been unkind in its depiction of his friend John Belushi.
Similarly, we’ll never see how he would have embodied the character of Ignatius J. Reilly in the unmade screen adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, or as Mr. Wolf in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a role which, according to my interviews with members of Candy’s team, he carefully considered before eventually declining due to its violent themes.
I was left wondering whether, had Candy not died while filming the underwhelming Wild West comedy Wagons East, in 1994, he would have someday left the Academy Awards with that fated Oscar, the way Robin Williams later did for his performance in Good Will Hunting.
Paul Myers is a Berkeley, Canada–based writer, musician, and podcaster
