Molly Shannon’s Tragic Family Car Accident: Everything you need to know about the crash that killed her mother and sister

• Molly Shannon rose to fame as a comedian on ‘Saturday Night Live’.
• It gave rise to the hilarious character Mary Katherine Gallagher.
• His mother and sister died in a tragic car accident in his youth.
• The actress once revealed that the tragedy helped inspire the character for which she is best known.

Molly Shannon, Aged 58, he has made a career out of entertaining people. of peculiar Saturday night live characters from Sally O’Malley (“I’m fifty!”) to her no-nonsense portrayal of an arrogant socialite on the HBO Max series. the white lotus, has proven over the decades that it has variety and talent to spare. The Cleveland, Ohio native has also had a high-profile film career over the years, including opposite roles. Jim Carrey In How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), opposite Cameron Diaz In bad teacher (2011) and has appeared as a voice actor in several animated films.

He also had a happy and successful family life. Molly marries an acclaimed artist chestnut omelette in May 2004, and they’ve been married for nearly two decades. She has since welcomed two children: a daughter and a son.

But it turns out that, like so many comedians, his career was preceded by tragedy. mother of him (Maria Margherita “Peg” Shannon) and sister katie she died in a car accident when she was a child and has referred to the tragedy and its influence on her several times throughout her career.

Here’s what you need to know about the sad events that led to the deaths of your mother and sister.

It happened when she was only four years old.

The accident happened when Molly was just four years old, circa 1968. Worse, she was actually involved in the tragic car crash, sharing her haunting memories of the moment that claimed the life of her 33-year-old mother. “The car was severely damaged in the impact,” she wrote in her 2022 memoir. Hi Molly! “A man passing by stopped. My mother was lying on the floor next to our car and she asked her, ‘Where are my daughters?’ She wanted to reunite her three little daughters and she couldn’t. Her heart must have broken at that moment. And those were her last words.

A cousin was also killed.

Along with her mother and three-year-old sister, Molly’s cousin was also lost in the accident. “My little sister Katie and my cousin Fran they were killed instantly,” he wrote in Hi Molly! The actress painfully recalled that she was confused afterwards. “I didn’t know what death was,” she recalled. “I was wondering, ‘Why did mom and Katie leave without me? Maybe I’m bad. “

Molly sustained an injury in the crash.

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A post shared by Molly Shannon (@theofficialsuperstar)

Even if Molly, his father James Francis Shannon, and her older sister, Mary, (age 6 at the time) survived, Molly says she sustained injuries. “Since Mary and I were deep in the back of the truck, we only suffered a concussion and a broken arm, respectively,” she wrote in her memoir. “Katie was buried in the rubble.”

From PEOPLE, his father was so badly injured in the crash that he had to relearn how to perform simple tasks like walking. He was unemployed for several years as a result of the accident.

Your father drove.

According to her Wikipedia page, Molly’s father was driving and under the influence of drugs when the accident occurred. He had been drinking after a party and, on his way home, he crashed into another vehicle and hit a pole. But she holds no hard feelings and even credits him with encouraging her Hollywood ambitions. “He was so positive, and when I first went to Hollywood, he said, ‘Molly, you’re going to those Hollywood agents and managers, she hunches over, she does her high jumps, she walks into their desks and she says to them, ‘ Hey, sure, the phone. I’m talented. And he was like, ‘Use your voice to sing.’ So that was his advice in show business, and that’s exactly what I did,” he said. Stop in 2019.

Eventually, all of the experience would lead her to take out life insurance as well. “The incident changed our lives dramatically,” he said in 2007. “In an instant, my father became a single father and the sole breadwinner for our family. Even at a young age, I was well aware of the financial and emotional stress I was under. People don’t like to think about bad things that happen to them, but putting off deciding to face that possibility can have serious consequences.

The tragedy helped inspire his iconic character.

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A post shared by Molly Shannon (@theofficialsuperstar)

Molly shared in her memoir how the experience ended up inspiring a character that would define her career: Saturday night livethe silly “superstar” of Mary Katherine Gallagher Catholic High School. “Mary Katherine wants to be a star and she wants to be seen and she wants her mother to come back from the dead,” she wrote. “The character is a survivor…an adult son of an alcoholic. A girl who stumbles. But get up. She is an emotional character. I wrote from the heart.”

Mary Katherine “really attracted me,” she said. Los Angeles Times in 2022, “how I felt after the accident: nervous, accident-prone, eager to please, fuck, but full of hope. I exaggerated everything I heard as a kid and made it into a character.” Mary Katherine’s beloved character also got her own 1999 spin-off film. Superstar.

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