(Left-right:) Daryl Hannah in 2023; John Candy in 1991.Photo:Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy; Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy; Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty
Daryl Hannahis remembering her late costarJohn Candy— and their project that could have been.
“What a great man,” she tells PEOPLE when asked about the March 4 anniversary of his death. “He was just so lovely.”
Their friendship continued after filming the boy-meets-mermaid rom-com hit. In 2016, Hannah described Candy as “tears-coming-out-of-your-eyes, pee-your-pants hilarious” toEmpire.
Doing press together, she recalled, “I used to sit on his lap all the time and he would talk for me and I’d mime what he was saying like a ventriloquist doll. He’d answer questions for me in interviews.”
Had theSpaceballsandCool Runningsstar not tragically died of cardiac arrest at age 43, Hannah tells PEOPLE the two would have collaborated again — with many of the same team members fromSplash.
“Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel were writing the script,” she says of two of the screenwriters behindSplash, who earned an Academy Award nomination for the movie.
The project “was something that I kind of made up,” says Hannah, “sort of a love story.”
Candy, she adds, “would’ve been my romantic lead.”
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“He just taught me a lot about being a great scene partner,”Laurie Metcalf, who starred with Candy in 1989’sUncle Buck, told PEOPLE.
“I hadn’t done hardly any movies,” she added. “He was good at reading people and knowing what would make them comfortable.”
“John’s comedy lives on, but my memory of him has the words ‘kindness’ and ‘sweetness’ in the headlines,” saidSteve Martin, his costar on 1987’sPlanes, Trains and Automobiles.
source: people.com
