The Hidden Truth Of John Candy

Ranking among the most gifted and accomplished comic actors of all time, John Candy dominated funny films for a decade and a half. Through the entirety of the 1980s and into the 1990s, the former Canadian sketch comedy performer starred in or played an important supporting role in one classic blockbuster after another. Candy not only brought huge laughs to his work, but nuance and depth, whether it was a high-concept comedy like "Splash," "Spaceballs," or "1941," or reality-grounded stuff like "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," "Uncle Buck," or "Stripes." Movies from the late 20th century would've been a lot different, and probably worse, if not for Candy's contributions.

Candy acted in so many things that he really let his work speak for itself, expressing himself through the art of performance. As such, those not in his inner circle didn't really know all that much about the actor and comedian. Here's a look below the surface and into the rich personal and professional story of John Candy.

John Candy was born in the Toronto area in 1950, and subsequently raised there by parents Evangeline and Sidney Candy, the latter who worked as a car salesman. When his older brother Jim was 6 years old, and he was just 4 years old, the father of the family died unexpectedly from issues surrounding heart disease. Sidney Candy was 35 years old. The devastating loss impacted the family financially, too. Following her husband's death, Evangeline Candy and the children moved to the Toronto borough of East York and into a shared home with the boys' grandparents and an aunt.

Into adulthood, John Candy remained haunted by his father's death, especially after he developed medical issues and unhealthy addictions similar to the ones that played a role in Sidney Candy dying so young. "No one talked about it, but it was in the back of John's mind, too," Candy's brother-in-law Frank Hober told People in 1994, after the actor died of a heart attack at the age of 43.

Before he decided to pursue his gifts and skills in comedy and acting as a profession, John Candy was on a path to potential fame and fortune as an athlete. He played offensive tackle for his Toronto area high school football team in the late 1960s until he seriously hurt a knee, one of the most common injuries in football. With his sports days and dreams over, Candy focused on performing, and came of age right when Toronto was in the midst of a live comedy boom.

The backup plan wound up helping the original goal come back around for Candy. His career starring in blockbuster comedy movies of the 1980s made him a wealthy and prominent enough citizen that he could buy a stake of a franchise in the Canadian Football League. In 1991, he (and fellow renowned Canadian Wayne Gretzky) purchased a 10% share of his hometown CFL team, the Toronto Argonauts. At the end of his first season as a team owner, the Argonauts captured the CFL's championship, the Grey Cup.

The first iteration of Second City opened in Chicago in 1959, as a small theater to showcase improvisational and sketch comedy. It evolved into an acting and comedy school of sorts, providing the chops-building training ground for multiple generations of comic and character actors. Hundreds of famous and notable performers began their careers at Second City, or one of its branches in other major North American cities, including Jason Sudeikis, Martin Short, Tim Robinson, and perhaps most famously, John Candy. The Second City Toronto hired the performer in 1973, when he was 22 years old. Three years later, when producer Andrew Alexander developed a television adaptation for Canada's Global network, Candy was among the first of the theatrical comedians hired.

Initially titled "The Second City Television Network," "SCTV" boasted some generational talent, home to future comedy superstars like Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, and Candy. It aired off and on throughout the late 1970s, mostly in Canada, until NBC picked it up to air following "Saturday Night Live." By that point, Candy had left the show, but he returned just as the show would acquire a much larger audience. It was a quick jump to big movies for Candy after showcasing his characters on "SCTV" programs, including TV star Johnny La Rue, the sci-fi movie monster Grogan, and satirical riffs on Julia Child and Beaver Cleaver from "Leave it to Beaver."

"Saturday Night Live" being a venerable, indestructible late-night institution is a false fact about "SNL" one might have always assumed to be true. After five seasons, all of the original cast members had left the show, along with creator and hands-on producer Lorne Michaels. The quality of the show suffered as a result, and NBC couldn't secure advertisers for the series. The network began looking at alternatives, including "Roadshow." First proposed as a series to air in the "SNL" time slot when that show took breaks, "Roadshow" joined the list of possible permanent replacements. A comic travelogue, it would've sent out comedians to interview real, quirky people, which John Candy could've hosted. NBC ultimately didn't order the show to series, but months later, Candy's "SCTV Network 90" began airing in the U.S. right after "SNL."

Candy gave comedy at NBC another try in 1992. With producing partner Jason Shubb, the actor pitched a special called "Bram Stoker's John Candy Special." With a title mocking the then-current film "Bram Stoker's Dracula," Candy's concept involved him playing himself hosting a show that was broadcast from the moon. However, it was never made because Candy and Shubb weren't aware that their development deal with NBC had quietly expired.

A sunny chapter in the tangled life of actor Chevy Chase, the 1983 comedy classic "National Lampoon's Vacation" finds the Griswold family suffering one disaster and indignity after another. When they finally reach their destination of the theme park Walley World, they're thwarted by a self-important doofus of a security guard who prevents them from entering by proclaiming, "Sorry, folks, park's closed." Clark Griswold (Chase) responds by holding the guard at gunpoint (with a BB gun) and forcing him to take the whole family on all the park's rides.

The movie originally ended in a different way: The Griswolds skip the park and harass park founder Roy Walley at his home. Test audiences hated the flat conclusion, so director Harold Ramis asked screenwriter John Hughes to come up with a better one. He wrote the one that was used, and Ramis cast John Candy as the security guard in the hastily filmed scenes. Candy quickly came up with a character by reviving Wally Wipazipachuck, a goofy security guard he'd played on the 1970s Canadian kids' series "Coming Up Rosie."

"We edited it, we attached it to the film, we tested it, and then the test marketing went through the roof at that point," Ramis once explained (via Entertainment Weekly). "But then the rethink kind of saved the picture in a big way."

John Candy was objectively a major Hollywood star, consistently headlining American-made blockbusters for more than a decade. But as busy as he was in the U.S. film industry, Candy was never away from Canadian television for long, appearing in shows made explicitly for that country and its audiences. In 1976, Candy broke out on the small screen, appearing on four different Canadian TV shows that year, including "SCTV." That sketch comedy show led to a role in "Stripes," released in 1981, the same year Candy showed up on the CBC's "Tales of the Klondike." In 1983, Candy turned in a pivotal cameo in "National Lampoon's Vacation," but he also starred in the Canadian film "Going Berserk" with fellow "SCTV" stars Joe Flaherty and Eugene Levy. Two years later, Candy entertained American audiences in "Summer Rental" and "Brewster's Millions" and CBC viewers with the mockumentary "The Canadian Conspiracy."

One of Candy's final projects before his 1994 death was "Hostage for a Day," a kidnapping comedy in which he starred and directed. He filmed it in various sites around his home province of Ontario.

For comic actors in the 1980s, the path to stardom wound through "Saturday Night Live." Unlike Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, and Martin Short, John Candy's involvement with "SNL" was limited: he hosted one episode in 1983, and made a cameo in an "SNL" special in 1985. But it's not like "SNL" didn't want him there. 

When Dick Ebersol took over as head producer in 1981, he attempted to poach "SCTV" stars, namely Candy. But then NBC executive Irv Wilson made overtures to bring "SCTV" to the network's late-night lineup, and the feud between him and Ebersol was leaked to reporters, who then pestered Candy for comment. Being in the middle of the scandal upset Candy to the point where he retreated to his farm in Ontario and didn't answer his phone.

As for guest-hosting "SNL," Candy was often a finalist. "Two weeks ahead of time they've got a pool of names, two or three people, and they ask these people to host the show," show writer Bob Odenkirk explained in James Miller's "Live From New York." According to Odenkirk, as the show date approaches, the producer makes up their mind, and the other candidates get "burned." "Supposedly John Candy was like the most-burned potential host, in that he would never host the show, because he'd been asked to do it so many times and then told 'no thanks' at the last minute."

Del, the obnoxious, big-hearted shower ring traveling salesman with a sad secret central to 1987's Thanksgiving road comedy "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," is arguably John Candy's most iconic role. Written and directed by frequent Candy collaborator John Hughes and co-starring his friend Steve Martin, "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" offered an environment that made the actor comfortable to offer suggestions about the film's creative direction. The scene in which Neal (Martin), who despises Del and his intrusion into his life, has a hallucinatory vision of Candy's character as the devil, was born out of Candy's urge to prank Paramount Pictures executives visiting the set. "They were really over-budget and over-schedule, and Paramount was coming down to get everything going," the actor's son, Chris Candy, told The Hollywood Reporter. "My dad had the idea that it would be funny if Steve saw Del as the devil." The execs got very upset when they glimpsed Candy traipsing around the set in a cheesy devil getup.

Near the end of the movie, Del confesses to Neal that the beloved wife he speaks of constantly died many years earlier, and that his loneliness is why he's so annoyingly clingy. The last bit of the monologue delivers an emotional gut punch: "But this time I couldn't let go." Candy came up with that line on his own during filming.

John Candy appeared in some of the most definitive comedy films of the 1980s and early 1990s, including "Stripes," "Spaceballs," and "Home Alone." He may have acted in so many more, if not for circumstances out of his control. The 1980 comedy "Used Cars" was meant to star Candy as Sam Slaton, but after rehearsals he dropped out because his agent had landed him a role in another movie that took precedence, so he ceded the part to his "SCTV" co-star Joe Flaherty. Following his acclaimed performance in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," Monty Python alum Graham Chapman approached Candy to star in "Ditto," playing a guy who uses a photocopy machine to clone himself; Chapman died in 1989 with the film unmade. For the animated "Pocahontas," a Disney movie based on a seriously dark story, Candy recorded dialogue for a wisecracking animal sidekick named Redfeather. Filmmakers entirely cut the character out of the movie.

When casting Louis Tully, the annoying nerd turned spiritually possessed "Keymaster" in "Ghostbusters," director Ivan Reitman offered the role to his first choice. Candy read the outline, and he had some thoughts. "He said, 'Well, maybe if I played him as a German guy who had a bunch of German shepherd dogs,'" Reitman recalled to Entertainment Weekly. The filmmaker passed on making the changes, Candy passed on the part, and "SCTV" star Rick Moranis got the gig instead.

No matter where his work took him, John Candy was usually the most famous person around. But he was no spoiled celebrity, treating his cohort with respect and treating comedy like a big tent with plenty of room for everyone. Playing Lone Star, the faux Han Solo in Mel Brooks's "Star Wars" parody "Spaceballs," marked the first significant role for Bill Pullman, who starred opposite Candy's Chewbacca-like furry man-monster Barf. While filming a climactic scene, Candy asked Brooks to change the script and to give some of his funny lines to Pullman. In 1991, Candy and Maureen O'Hara played son and mother in "Only the Lonely." When he found out that the production had placed him in a large trailer and given the Hollywood legend a tiny one, Candy gave his to O'Hara.

In the 1980s, future comedy writer and late-night host Conan O'Brien arranged for Candy to visit his college, Harvard University, and gave himself the job of showing the actor around campus. "He was everything I wanted John Candy to be in person," O'Brien said on the "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend" podcast. When Candy asked about his career plans, O'Brien mentioned that he was thinking about giving comedy a shot. "'Kid, you don't try comedy. You do it 'cause you have to.' And I walked away from that thinking, 'he's right.'"

While known for his prodigious output of comedic films and television work, John Candy harbored the ambition to try serious acting. In the early 1990s, he played against type in the romantic dramedy "Only the Lonely" and portrayed attorney Dean Andrews Jr. in Oliver Stone's historical piece "JFK." Candy died in 1994, just when he was seemingly on the verge of a breakthrough into more dramatic fare.

During pre-production of "The Magic Man" (later made under the name "Telling Lies in America"), Candy invited screenwriter Joe Eszterhas to his home and literally begged for the lead role. "He said he was trying to change his image from the goofball funnyman to a real actor," Eszterhas wrote in "Hollywood Animal." The writer signed off, but within weeks, Candy's agent forced him to quit because of an old grievance against Eszterhas. Candy also nearly played the main character in a film version of the tragic real-life story of Fatty Arbuckle, a silent movie star turned accused murderer, and blowhard Ignatius J. Reilly in an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "A Confederacy of Dunces."

The final film in which John Candy would participate was a Western comedy called "Wagons East." Released in August 1994, the box office bomb and critically loathed picture starred Candy as a wagon master who guides unhappy Old West settlers in their return to the East Coast. On March 3, 1994, Candy filmed his last scene for the movie, produced on location outside Durango, Mexico. After speaking briefly with his children in Los Angeles over the phone, and looking to celebrate the end of the job and a good performance, Candy prepared an after-midnight dinner of spaghetti for his team of assistants. Then he called his co-stars, Richard Lewis and Robert Picardo, to praise their work on "Wagons East," and went to bed.

Candy didn't wake up in the morning. Sometime in the night, the actor suffered a heart attack and died. Tragically joining the list of actors who passed away while filming, John Candy was 43 years old.