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Catherine O’Hara, Beloved Comic Actress, Dies at 71
She made an indelible impression with hilariously memorable roles in films and TV
Catherine O'Hara, who made generations of film and TV viewers laugh, died on Friday. She was 71.
KC Armstrong/Deadline via Getty Images
Catherine O’Hara, a gifted Canadian-born comic actor and SCTV alum who starred as Macaulay Culkin’s harried mother in two Home Alone movies and won an Emmy as the dramatically ditzy wealthy matriarch Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek, died Friday. She was 71.
O’Hara died at her home in Los Angeles “following a brief illness,” according to a statement from her agency, Creative Artists Agency. Further details were not immediately available.
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O’Hara was born in Toronto in 1954 to a large Irish-Catholic family. She launched her career at the Second City in Toronto in the in 1970s. It was there that she first worked with Eugene Levy, who would become a lifelong collaborator — and her Schitt’s Creek costar. The two would be among the original cast of the sketch show SCTV, short for “Second City Television.” The series, which began on Canadian TV in the 1970s and aired on NBC in the U.S. in the early ‘80s, spawned a legendary group of esoteric comedians including Martin Short, John Candy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis and Joe Flaherty.
Hollywood didn’t entirely know what to do with O’Hara and her scattershot style. She played oddball supporting characters in Martin Scorsese’s 1985 After Hours and Tim Burton’s 1988 Beetlejuice — a role she would reprise in the 2024 sequel.
O’Hara earned her greatest critical acclaim for her portrayal of Moira Rose on "Schitt’s Creek” for six seasons.
CBC/Xourtesy Everett Collection
She played it mostly straight as a horrified mother who accidentally abandoned her child in the two Home Alone movies. The films were among the biggest box office earners of the early 1990s, and their Christmas setting made them TV perennials.
On “The Studio,” O'Hara, left, with costars Seth Rogen and Chase Sui, played a movie executive near the end of her career.
Apple TV+ / Courtesy Everett Collection
O’Hara would find her groove with the crew of improv pros brought together by Christopher Guest for a series of mockumentaries that began with 1996’s Waiting for Guffman and continued with 2000’s Best in Show, 2003’s A Mighty Wind and 2006’s For Your Consideration. The latter earned her a nomination for best supporting actress at AARP’s Movies for Grownups Awards for 2006.
Schitt’s Creek would be a career-capping triumph and the perfect personification of her comic talents. The small show created by Levy and his son Dan, about a wealthy family forced to live in a tiny town, would dominate the Emmys in its sixth and final season. It brought O’Hara, always a beloved figure, a new generation of fans and put her at the center of cultural attention. (She also won an AARP Movies for Grownups Award for best TV actress for the role.)
She told The Associated Press that she pictured Moira, a former soap opera star, as someone who had married rich and wanted to “remind everyone that (she was) special, too.” With an exaggerated Mid-Atlantic accent and obscure vocabulary, Moira spoke unlike anyone else, using words like “frippet,” “pettifogging” and “unasinous,” to show her desire to be different, O’Hara said. To perfect Moira’s voice, O’Hara would pore through old vocabulary books, “Moira-izing” the dialogue even further than what was already written.
The show also brought a career renaissance that led to a dramatic turn on HBO’s The Last of Us and a straitlaced role as a Hollywood producer in The Studio, both of which earned her Emmy nominations. (She also received an AARP Movies for Grownups television best-actress nomination for her work on The Studio.)
She is survived by her husband, Bo Welch, sons Matthew and Luke, and siblings Michael O’Hara, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Maureen Jolley, Marcus O‘Hara, Tom O’Hara and Patricia Wallice.
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