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Molly Shannon rose to fame as a comedian on ‘Saturday Night Live.’
She originated the hilarious character Mary Katherine Gallagher.
Her mother and sister were killed in a tragic car accident during her youth.
The actress once revealed that the tragedy helped inspire the character she’s best known for.
Molly Shannon, 58, has made an entire career entertaining people. From quirky Saturday Night Live characters like Sally O’Malley (“I’m FIFty!”) to her serious turn as an overbearing socialite in HBO Max’s The White Lotus, she’s proven over decades that she has range and talent in spades. The Cleveland, Ohio native has also enjoyed a high profile career in film over the years, including roles opposite Jim Carrey in How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), opposite Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher (2011), and has shown up as featured voice characters in multiple animated films.
She’s also had a happy and successful home life. Molly married acclaimed artist Fritz Chesnut in May of 2004, and they’ve been married for almost two decades. She has since welcomed two children with him — a daughter and a son.
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But it turns out that, like so many comedians, her career was preceded by tragedy. Her mother (Mary Margaret “Peg” Shannon) and sister Katie were killed in a car accident when she was little, and she has referred to the tragedy and its influence on her multiple times throughout her career.
Here’s what to know about the sad events that led to the deaths of her mother and sister.
It happened when she was only four years old.
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The accident occurred when Molly was only four years old, around 1968. Worse still, she was actually in the tragic car crash — and she has shared her haunting memories of the moment that claimed her 33-year-old mother’s life. “The car was mangled badly on impact,” she wrote in her 2022 memoir, Hello, Molly! “A man passing the scene stopped. My mother was lying on the ground beside our car and she asked him, ‘Where are my girls?’ She wanted to gather her three little girls and she couldn’t. Her heart must have broken in that moment. And those were her final words.”
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A cousin was also killed.
Along with her mother and three-year-old sister, Molly’s cousin was also lost in the accident. “My baby sister, Katie, and cousin Fran were killed instantly,” she wrote in Hello, Molly! The actress gut wrenchingly remembered being confused in the aftermath. “I didn’t know what death was,” she recalled. “I just wondered, ‘Why did Mommy and Katie leave without me? Maybe I’m bad.’ ”
Molly suffered an injury in the accident.
Though Molly, her father James Francis Shannon, and her older sister Mary, (6 at the time) survived, Molly says they did sustain injuries. “Since Mary and I were in the very back of the station wagon, we just had a concussion and a broken arm, respectively,” she wrote in her memoir. “Katie was buried in the wreckage.”
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Per PEOPLE, her father was so badly injured in the wreck that he had to relearn how to do simple tasks, like walk. He was out of work for several years as a result of the incident.
Her father was driving.
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According to her Wikipedia page, Molly’s father was driving, and was under the influence when the accident occurred. He had been drinking after a party, and on the way home broadsided another vehicle, then slammed into a pole. But she holds no ill will, and even credits him for encouraging her in her Hollywood ambitions. “He was so positive and when I first went out to Hollywood, he was like, ‘Molly, you go into those Hollywood agents and managers, you doll yourself up, put on your high heels, march into those offices and you tell them, Hey, hold the phone. I’ve got talent.’ And he would say, ‘Use your singing voice.’ So, that was his showbiz advice, and that is exactly what I did,” she told Parade in 2019.
Ultimately, the entire experience would lead her to advocate for life insurance, as well. “The accident changed our lives dramatically,” she said in 2007. “In an instant, my dad became a single parent and the only breadwinner for our family. Even at a young age, I was well aware of the financial and emotional stress he was under. People don’t like to think about bad things happening to them, but putting off the decision to deal with that possibility can have serious consequences.”
The tragedy helped inspire her iconic character.
Molly shared in her memoir how the experience wound up inspiring a character that would all but define her career — Saturday Night Live‘s goofy “superstar” Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher. “Mary Katherine wants to be a star and she wants to be seen and she wants her mom to come back from the dead,” she wrote. “The character is a survivor… an adult child of an alcoholic. A girl who trips. But gets back up. It’s an emotional character. I wrote from my heart.”
Mary Katherine was “really based on me,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2022, “how I felt after the accident — really nervous, accident-prone, wanting to please, f*** up but full of hope. I just exaggerated everything I felt as a little girl and turned it into a character.” The beloved character of Mary Katherine also got her own spinoff movie, 1999’s Superstar.
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