When Molly Shannon was 4, her mum and baby sister died in a car crash. Her dad was the driver.

Most people would know of actor Molly Shannon from her various comedic roles, whether it was from the years she spent as a cast member of Saturday Night Live (SNL) or from her 1999 cult-hit Superstar, where she played repressed Catholic schoolgirl, Mary Katherine Gallagher.

Yet beneath her veneer of humour and wit, Molly has lived through an unimaginable tragedy - the deaths of her mother, her three-year-old sister Katie, and her cousin Fran, in a terrible car crash in June 1969.

Molly, who was only four at the time, was sitting at the very back of the station wagon with her older sister Mary, six. Her father was at the wheel of the car. He'd been drinking heavily at the daylong party they were driving home from and in his drunken state, he sideswiped a car on the road and swerved straight into a steel pole.

"The car was mangled badly on impact," Molly wrote in her memoir Hello Molly!. "A man passing the scene stopped. My mother was lying on the ground beside our car and she asked him, 'Where are my girls?' She wanted to gather her three little girls and she couldn't. Her heart must have broken in that moment. And those were her final words."

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Being right at the back of the car likely saved Molly and Mary's lives. For how serious the accident was, Molly only suffered a broken arm and Mary had a concussion.

In the days that followed, the four-year-old couldn't understand where her mum and little sister were, and why they weren't ever coming back.

"I think because I was so little, it's like there's no way that you could really, fully accept that and understand that, you know? So I went into a fantasy waiting for her to come back for a long time," Molly told Anderson Cooper on his podcast All There Is.

"And I thought maybe when we went back to the house that we lived in before the accident, I thought maybe she would be around the corner. And then I went to grade school, I went to Saint Dominic's, and I was still in a fantasy, kind of waiting...

"But I think my fantasy about waiting for my mum was punctured in fifth grade because this boy, Wally, passed me a note and it was like, Haha, your mum is dead. And I looked at it in class and I just broke down crying and and all these kids, like, huddled around me and they were like, it's okay, Molly. And I felt so embarrassed."

Molly's father, James, was badly injured in the car crash and had to relearn how to walk. Understandably, he suffered intense guilt over the car accident.

"It's before Mothers Against Drunk Driving, friends don't let friends drive drunk - we have so much more awareness now," Molly said in an interview on The Howard Stern Show. "This was 1969. Not that I'm trying to bail him out, I take this very seriously. I did not grow up blaming him.

"He really tried his hardest raising us, and he had to learn to walk again after the car accident with braces on his legs, so I admired him. He tried really hard... He felt so guilty."

For Molly, being raised by a single father meant there was no pressure to be "ladylike". She wore what she wanted to wear and leaned into making people laugh. In 1983, she enrolled in New York University (NYU) where she studied drama. It was there that she created the persona of Mary Katherine Gallagher, a character who would go on to become beloved by SNL viewers when Molly did a skit as the schoolgirl.

Little did everyone know then just how much of Molly was in Mary Katherine.

"The character is a survivor... an adult child of an alcoholic," the 57-year-old wrote in her memoir. "A girl who trips. But gets back up. It's an emotional character. I wrote from my heart."

As fame came her way and she started getting recognised in the street, Molly suddenly realised a devastating truth.

"The one person I wanted more than anyone to tell me I was good was my mum," she wrote. "I realised I'd been running for years, driven to work so hard, on this track, trying to make it, to achieve, and when I finally got there... there was that ache."

Molly expanded on this on the podcast with Anderson Cooper, telling him that she thought becoming famous would "fix everything".

"And I felt like, no, there's something missing. And it just felt like I really only wanted my mum. I was like, I just wanted her," she said. "I thought maybe if I become famous enough or do backflips or something, then she'll come back and tell me that she's so proud of me and she thinks I'm good. And I really cried about my mum for the first time. I couldn't feel it till I was in my thirties."

Becoming a mother herself has helped heal some of that tremendous ache. She and her husband, painter Fritz Chesnut, have two children together, Stella, 18 and Nolan, 17.

"I feel like all I ever wanted was to be a mum and now I get to redo what I didn't have," she told Cooper. "It is the most cathartic, deep feeling of love and deep, deep healing and so much indescribable joy."

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Learning about a long-held secret her father had kept also allowed Molly to heal.

It was 2001, and the actor was ending her six-year run on SNL. Her dad, James, came to visit her in New York, bringing with him a stranger, a "straight college boy" he'd met while drinking at a bar.

"He was drunk when he showed up. I was so bummed 'cause he really hadn't been drinking for a long time, been sober for a few years... And so when I walked in the door after rehearsals, my dad was like, 'Molly, this is Kevin!' You know, he was drunk. And I was like, 'Oh, nice to meet you.' And I was so mad 'cause it kind of makes you feel like you have to control everything," she said on The Howard Stern Show.

"Then we all went out to dinner... and I was so mad at him. This college kid has to see this darkness between me and my dad. It was so embarrassing."

Afterwards, she called her manager, Steven Levy, to complain about what had happened. Steven, a gay man who had also lost a parent as a child, had become friends with James over the years. He told her she was being too hard on her father.

"[Steven said] 'You don’t understand, he’s given up so much for you girls, so much for you and Mary. And he kept repeating it, and I go, 'What are you saying? Are you saying he’s gay?' And he was like, 'I don't want to tell you! He's going to tell you.' And I was like, 'Oh my god'," she recalled. 

"I felt so much compassion. Kind of the pieces of the story all coming together. It's tragic."

That same year, while they were at a hotel during a press junket for the film Serendipity, Molly decided to ask her father about his sexuality directly.

"I was just like, 'I'm gonna ask him, I'm gonna ask him.' 'Cause Steven Levy kept telling me, 'He's gonna tell you, he is gonna tell you.' But then he wasn't telling me. So I just one day asked him by the pool: 'Have you ever thought you might be gay?' And he just said, 'Most definitely.' And he was 72."

Knowing her father was gay allowed her to truly understand his drinking and alcoholism. "Imagine if you couldn’t be who you were sexually," she said. "It’s horrible."

James told her he had known since "grade school" that he was gay. He would go on double dates and look at the boy, instead of the girl. He would look at J.C. Penney catalogues and be attracted to the "macho men in their undershirts." He confessed he had had sexual encounters with men on sales trips and at truck stops.

"And I was happy for him. It was such an honour that he came out to me. And I think it was a relief for him to be able to tell me," Molly told National Public Radio (NPR).

In 2002, just six months after her dad confirmed he was gay, he died from prostate cancer. Molly was grateful she got to spend time with him before he died and that at the end of his life, there was nothing left unsaid between them.

"I held his hands in the hospital room," she wrote in her memoir. "I felt incredibly honoured to be there while he was dying. I had lost my mother so abruptly. I treasured the good ending with my dad. That the rug was not pulled out from under me so suddenly.

"That I had time to say goodbye."

Feature Image: Getty.

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