Comedy legend John Candy remembered and immortalised by those who knew him best

Two weeks after John Candy’s unexpected death in 1994 at the age of 43, his friends and former colleagues held and broadcast a memorial service from his hometown of Toronto.

Taking to the lectern, Dan Ackroyd described Candy as a “devoted son, brother, altar boy, student, salesman, stage, radio and television writer and performer, world-famous comedy ambassador, farce and dramatic actor, international feature film star, director, businessman, connoisseur, percussionist, charitable benefactor, husband, father, and the sweetest, most generous person ever known to me”.

It’s a very long list but it captures Candy as someone who was all those things individually, and as someone who was, well, all those things in one person. He was a special talent, and he was a singular talent.

But to his friends and family, he wasn’t just the funny guy on the screen in those movies and TV shows, he was their guy.

That thesis runs all the way through John Candy: I Like Me, a feature documentary directed by Colin Hanks, whose father Tom Hanks made Splash and Volunteers with Candy, along with a swathe of famous faces who revelled in the opportunity to remind the world of Candy’s impact.

Macauley Culkin, who starred with Candy in Uncle Buck, called him a “unicorn” and recalled that Candy would go out of his way to ask the young child star if everything was OK at home, because, Culkin intuited, Candy could tell family life at the Culkins’ wasn’t rosy.

Macauley and Kieran Culkin have both spoken about the difficulty of growing up with their father.

“I remember that,” Culkin said. “I remember John caring when not a lot of people did.”

Candy was born in 1950 just outside Toronto but his family moved to the city’s suburbs when he was young. His father, Sidney, died from a heart attack when he was 35 years old. Candy was only five at the time, and his dad’s death would hang over his whole life, first as a glaring absence, and then as a genetic time bomb.

His childhood friends described him in the documentary as being shy and introverted, but that Candy was obsessed with Firesign, a sketch comedy radio show, which along with his love of cinema – including the old-timers such as Laurel & Hardy, Humphrey Bogart, Jackie Gleeson – sparked something in him.

Candy wanted to be a football star, but blew out his left kneecap on the field which ended those aspirations, and the injury kept him from the US Army accepting his enlistment during the Vietnam War.

He had a couple of small roles here and there, including on a kids TV show, but Candy’s break came when he successfully auditioned for the soon-to-be-launched Toronto branch of the famed improvisational comedy troupe, The Second City.

It was life changing, not just for Candy and the throng of now household names who was among those first classes, but for the generations of fans that followed.

Look at this roster of names, some of the most famous comedians ever, Canadian or not: Candy, Ackroyd, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy and Gilda Radner (who was American).

Within a couple of years, the Toronto team would spin-off SCTV in 1976, which was seen as Saturday Night Live’s poor cousin, but which had an outsized mark on the culture as a talent incubator.

Most of The Second City folks did the TV show, but also added Rick Moranis and Joe Flaherty to the cast, while Harold Ramis was brought on to be the head writer.

Candy and Levy were thrown together a lot, and it was one of those sketches that a young Tom Hanks came across on TV one night. Hanks said it was “mesmerising”.

He also recalled that when they later worked together in features, he found Candy to be an incredibly generous scene partner. Candy wasn’t out for himself, he didn’t want to hog the best jokes or get the biggest laughs, he brought that improv ethos of “Yes, and?” and only wanted to make the scene better.

O’Hara tells the story of how Candy’s one day of availability on Home Alone turned into an almost 24-hour odyssey as he tried more and more improv, and how their scene together in the back of that truck evoked all the times they would hang and crack jokes during those Second City days.

It says a lot that Candy’s compatriots from that era all participated in this documentary, the exception of Moranis, and those who had died including Radner, Flaherty and Ramis.

In their memories, and also the likes of Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Mel Brooks and Chris Columbus, Candy is a larger-than-life figure but also a tender soul and a generous friend.

He was always picking up the tab in those early years, even when he was earning the same as everyone else – and that wasn’t much. Or when he quietly donated money to a hospital in Durango, Mexico, where he was filming Wagons East, and where he died.

His death was a surprise but it also wasn’t, and definitely not in retrospect. Friends including Martin recalled how Candy had fought to be conscious of his health over his life – sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, mostly he struggled.

It was his father’s heart attack at 35 that he could never forget, and from 1991, Candy started to experience crippling anxiety attacks. He sought therapy and had a nutritionist. But, in the end, his heart gave out.

John Candy: I Like Me is a straightforward documentary in many ways, using archival footage, unseen clips and interviews with those who knew him best including his widow and now adult children, but the man whose story it tells is anything but ordinary.

John Candy: I Like Me is streaming on Prime from October 10