More than three decades after his death, John Candy remains one of Canada’s best-known comedy exports, from his time as the breakout star of the groundbreaking sketch comedy series SCTV to films like Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

2025 marked 75 years since his birth, and two projects observed that milestone: I Like Me, a feature-length documentary produced by Vancouver-born actor Ryan Reynolds, and John Candy: A Life in Comedy, a new biography by writer, podcaster, and former Vancouverite Paul Myers.

Myers looks back at Candy’s career as well as the influence he continues to have on a new generation of performers, using archival interviews and new testimonies from the likes of Ben Stiller and Patton Oswalt. John Candy: A Life in Comedy is his fifth book.

Myers admits the original idea was to follow up his 2018 book about Kids in the Hall with a history of SCTV, but he abandoned the idea when director Martin Scorsese announced his since-delayed documentary about the troupe.

“And then Doug, my editor, said, ‘Well, why don’t you just do John Candy and then you can talk about films like Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Cool Runnings and all these things that are also part of that story that aren’t SCTV?’ And I went, ‘Oh my God, can I do that?’”

Myers shows how Candy continues to influence today’s performers, not just for his work, but for who he was.

“He’s a great model for being a good person. I finally got to talk to Ryan Reynolds recently, and he said, ‘He was good even when no one was looking,’” Myers said.

“We live in a time when, let’s be honest, some of the people at the top don’t have a lot of empathy and compassion, or they’re not acting it out. If they do, they’re not showing us. Guys like Candy represent the best of us, people who tried really hard to bring joy and compassion and empathy in their work, but also off camera.”

John Candy was born on Halloween in 1950, but, as Myers puts it, “Nothing about [him] particularly foretold of [his] evolution into one of the most highly regarded actors that Canada ever sent to the movie screens of the world.” By all accounts, he had a relatively normal upbringing in suburban Toronto.

One event that would come to shape his life profoundly was the death of his father, Sidney, at the age of 35 from a heart attack. He was suddenly without a father just three days shy of his fifth birthday. That left Candy with a sense of fatalism he would have for the rest of his life, that any years he had after age 35 would essentially be borrowed time.

Candy himself would die in his sleep of a heart attack in 1994. He was 43 years old.

“It seems that he was keenly aware of what people often call the Sword of Damocles, this idea that eventually his number would come up. He thought it would come before 35,” said Myers.

“There is a history of heart disease in his family. So, he had that modeled for him from a very early age, that things you love could be taken away suddenly.”

Candy caught the comedy bug early, realizing it was easy to make friends if he could make them laugh. “He soon won friends with his secret weapon: a finely honed sense of humour,” Myers writes. That seems to be the origin story of many a comedian or comic actor.

Candy took to acting almost by accident, too, when a football injury ended his gridiron dreams forever, and he discovered his high school’s theatre department. “Everything was amplified when he got onstage” and “[he used] being jolly as a coping mechanism to deflect criticism,” Myers observes.

At one point, Candy was going to join the Marines but was talked out of that. Then he was going to study journalism but was talked out of that, too. And finally, at the tender age of 19, he decided to become an actor.

Candy would become part of a remarkable generation of young Canadian comedic actors blossoming in the early 1970s, many of whom would join him as fellow cast members at Second City Toronto and later SCTV.

“The musical Godspell had opened their first Toronto cast, and they brought out all these theatre people like Eugene Levy, Martin Short, and Andrea Martin, and they were all in town doing that. And they also had a sense of humour,” Myers said.

“Meanwhile, Second City Chicago has decided to open a Toronto office in 1973, and they basically auditioned everybody, even from the Godspell cast, and they become the first cast of the Toronto Second City.”

“At one time or another, you had Catherine O’Hara, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty, and then eventually Robin Duke and different people. And these people would end up learning how to do improv comedy together.”

It wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling. Candy’s early big screen roles were of the scene-stealing variety, in films like The Blues Brothers and 1941. But Myers shows Candy’s acting career didn’t really blossom until he met director John Hughes. The pair would work together over four films, three of those with Hughes as director. Myers argues Candy’s collaborations with Hughes represented some of his best work.

“You have Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Uncle Buck, and, to some degree, Only the Lonely. These films are all John Hughes productions that featured Candy in the right light. Those are the best films for John Candy,” he said.

Myers also looks at Candy’s internal struggles away from the spotlight. Candy turned 40 in 1990, and as he got older, his health becomes a greater concern, from weight gain to increasing panic attacks and even a case of imposter syndrome.

“It started to catch up with him,” said Myers.

“I think he was a people pleaser. This gets back to the idea of wanting to change the vibes in the room. He was constantly feeling responsible for people. He was responsible for his mother when he was a little kid. He was the guy who drove his mother to buy groceries. He was always responsible for everyone else’s mood and everyone else’s vibe and everyone else’s success.”

He also had aspirations on the other side of the camera. Candy’s last film, Wagons East, was a bit of a paycheque role so he could fund other projects, as he had an eye on doing more work from the director’s chair. Candy would die in his sleep of a heart attack while filming on location in Mexico.

Myers thinks he would have thrived today, in the age of streaming television.

“He played little guys, and I don’t mean small in stature, but he would play people who are salesmen and people who are cops and rank-and-file people,” said Myers.

“He might have been a great HBO star as a bumbling detective or something. And he also would have been on Schitt’s Creek for sure.”

Much like the man himself, John Candy: A Life in Comedy is full of heart, a moving portrait of a gentle giant, both in front of and away from the camera. Ultimately, Myers says Candy lived large, loved even larger, and the world loved him back.

“I realized that I was actually trying to be a better person after I wrote this book,” he said.

“Thanks for that gift, John.”

John Candy: A Life in Comedy is published by House of Anansi Press.

Don’t miss Books & Ideas: Paul Myers on John Candy – a conversation with Charles Demers, Tuesday, Jan. 21 at the Revue Stage on Granville Island.