Moira Rose

Once a soap opera star with a fortune, Moira Rose now lives in a run-down motel in the small town she owns but never wanted to see, her family's money and life having evaporated overnight. She holds court anyway, imperious and theatrical, treating the general store like a red carpet and everyone else like an audience.

Catherine O'Hara builds a whole invented dialect for her — vowels stretched into their own postal codes, words deployed for maximum drama rather than accuracy — and never signals the joke, which is why it lands every time. Underneath the wigs and pronouncements is real vanity and real fear, kept just visible enough to matter.