Catherine O’Hara, the beloved star of films like Home Alone and series like SCTV and Schitt’s Creek has died.
O’Hara’s passing was reported by TMZ and confirmed by Variety. O’Hara was only 71 years old. She reportedly died after “a brief illness.”
Born in 1954 and raised in Toronto, O’Hara’s big break in comedy came when O’Hara joined the cast of SCTV, the sketch series from the Toronto branch of Second City. Although she did some work in film and TV through the 1980s, appearing in films like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, O’Hara’s movie career got a major boost when she played Deelia Deetz, stepmother to Winona Ryder’s Lydia in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. (O’Hara returned to play Delia a second time in 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.)
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Two years later, O’Hara appeared in four films in one year, most importantly Home Alone, the generational favorite family comedy about a boy named Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) who gets forgotten by his family when they head to Europe for a vacation. As the boy’s mother, Kate McCallister, O’Hara played the heart of the film, the mom who moves heaven and earth to get back to her son on Christmas, and she shares several lovely scenes in the film with Culkin and the late, great John Candy, who she had worked with on SCTV. O’Hara later reprised her role in the sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
In the decades since the Home Alones, O’Hara has rarely gone a year or two without appearing on movie screens. Her funniest work may have come in the improvised films of director Christopher Guest of the 1990s and 2000s, including Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind, and Best in Show.
O’Hara was also a prolific voice actor who could be heard in movies like Chicken Little, Monster House, Over the Hedge, Elemental, Frankenweenie, and Where the Wild Things Are. Her best-known voice role was probably the unforgettable Sally from Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
In recent years, O’Hara’s best roles came on television. She won an Emmy for her work on Schitt’s Creek as family matriarch Moira. The show reunited her with another former SCTV co-star, Eugene Levy, who created the series with his son Dan Levy.
After the end of Schitt’s Creek, O’Hara joined Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Studio, where she played Rogen’s character’s mentor and former boss, Patty. That show earned her a nomination for another Emmy. She also appeared on the revival of The Kids in the Hall and the second season of The Last of Us.
This is already an impressive resume, but it barely scratchers the surface of her nearly 50-year Hollywood career. Beetlejuice and Home Alone, two very different mother characters from one of the funniest actors of her generation, ensure she will be remembered for decades to come.
