Obituary of Catherine O’Hara | film

“Kevin!” With this horrified exclamation, delivered in close-up, straight to the camera in the festive comedy Home Alone (1990), actress Catherine O’Hara, who has died aged 71 after a brief illness, cemented her place as one of cinema’s most neglected screen parents.

After inadvertently leaving her young son (played by Macaulay Culkin) in Chicago to the mercy of thieves while the rest of the McCallister family travels to Paris for Christmas, O’Hara’s character, Kate, spends the film struggling to find her way back. On her return trip, she accepted a ride from a polka band. Its leader is played by John Candy, one of O’Hara’s stablemates — along with Martin Short, Eugene Levy and Gilda Radner — since her early days in the Toronto improvisational comedy troupe Second City.

Putting a child in an inappropriate place all at once can be considered an ordeal. Doing it twice seems like negligence. Then again, plausibility is no match for the pressure of repeating the $477 million-grossing film, and so Kevin is separated from his family once again in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992). O’Hara turns the despair of motherhood into feverish comedy once again.

This role brought her fame but was not typical of her work. Eccentrics full of vanity, mischief, or vulnerability were closer to O’Hara’s style.

Before Home Alone, I found a wide audience in the Tim Burton comedy Beetlejuice (1988). She played Delia Dietz, a pretentious sculptor who moves with her husband and stepdaughter into a dilapidated house in Connecticut whose previous occupants — now ghosts — plan to evict them.

In the film’s standout scene, the family and dinner party guests are suddenly possessed and forced to sing and dance to Harry Belafonte’s calypso song Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). As the first to be transformed into a kind of human puppet, O’Hara’s mixture of horror, embarrassment and slow ecstasy is delirious slapstick delight. In her review of the film, critic Pauline Kael singled out the actress’ “sexy evil eyes” and described her as “possessing the strangest blue-eyed look since early Gene Wilder.” O’Hara returned as Delia in the sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), wandering the underworld after being fatally bitten by Asps.

However, O’Hara’s most deranged creation was Moira Rose in the acclaimed sitcom Schitt’s Creek (2015-20). This grand dame, a former soap star and a woman with many wigs, each bearing a name, was reduced to sharing cramped rooms in an Ontario hotel with her doting husband and two spoiled adult children after the family lost their fortune. Dreaming of regaining her former luxury and status, she hitches her wagon to questionable projects including a horror sequel called The Crows Have Eyes 3: The Crowening and a commercial for apocalyptic fruit wine (“It tastes like amoxicillin”) in which an increasingly harried Moira distorts the name of the wine in ever more tongue-twisting ways.

Examples of her cuckoo behavior across the show’s six series were countless, her upscale wardrobe was out of proportion to the popular milieu, and her accent was bafflingly wayward: she would playfully pronounce her son David’s name as “Dare-vid”, or make “baby” “naked”. For O’Hara, this crazy verbal exaggeration was part of the point. “When people try to imitate that character, the mistake they make is to be consistent,” she said. However, Moira was rarely anything less than a loving mother. “What did I tell you about putting your body online?” her daughter asks in one episode. “Never! Never without proper lighting.”

O’Hara won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her performance in the series, which was co-written by Levy and his son Dan Levy, who played her husband and son, respectively. O’Hara and Eugene Levy, who dated briefly in their stand-up days, magically starred together in four exceptionally smart and funny films directed by Christopher Guest and co-written by him and Levy.

Waiting for Goffman (1996) concerns a Missouri am-drama society whose members believe that their new musical celebrating local history (there is a production number about the manufacture of footstools) has Broadway potential. In keeping with the film’s gentle tone, O’Hara’s obvious love for her character, a travel agent and terrible actor, generates a warmth that precludes cruelty.

In Best in Show (2000), she and Levy play a married couple whose trip with their dog to a dog show is plagued by problems, starting with a lack of funds leading to their hotel downgrading from a suite to a broom closet.

They were a couple again, albeit separately, in A Mighty Wind (2003), about a memorial concert for folk musicians. Mitch and Mickey come together at the party, providing the poignant emotional undercurrent to this silly but painstakingly authentic film, before going their separate ways. O’Hara, as Mickey, was last seen performing a song about catheters at a medical supplies trade show.

For Your Concern (2006) was the only one of her films with Guest that did not adopt the mockumentary format, although it was no less funny for it. O’Hara is the unassuming veteran whose rumors that she might earn an Oscar nomination for playing a dying matriarch in a mediocre indie drama are upended. Soon she was wearing red leather numbers and undergoing plastic surgery that fixed her mouth with a rictus smile. The role played by O’Hara’s specialty: comedy of illusion.

While the structure and plot points of Guest’s films were committed to paper, the lion’s share of the material was improvised by the actors, and it was not unusual for the final 90-minute product to come out of up to 60 hours of raw footage.

“For me, the most rewarding improvisation is agreeing on an idea in advance, or where a scene could go, or who your character is, or what might be funny about your character, and at the same time being completely open to other people because you’re not alone,” O’Hara said.

In his book Improv Nation, Sam Wasson described her as “one of the most flexible improvisers of her generation. Others might have been crazier; none were so elegantly relaxed.”

She was born and raised in Toronto, the sixth of seven children. Her mother was a real estate agent and her father worked for Canadian Pacific Railways. She said their sense of humor informed her. “My father would tell great jokes that he brought home from the office and my mother would imitate everyone. I like to think I was a mix.”

Educated at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute, Toronto, she auditioned for Second City only to end up as a waitress. Eventually, she was hired as Radner’s replacement, who was dating O’Hara’s brother. Explaining her initial improvisation technique, O’Hara said: “My crutch was… to play crazy when in doubt. Because you didn’t have to excuse anything that came out of your mouth. It didn’t have to make sense.”

Between 1976 and 1984, the sketch show SCTV, a television spin-off of Second City, was a hit, earning O’Hara and her fellow writers and actors an Emmy Award in 1982.

In Martin Scorsese’s black comedy thriller After Hours (1985), an ice cream truck drives through Manhattan as part of the nighttime pursuit of the film’s hero, a computer programmer wrongly suspected of murder. She was a gossip journalist in the film Heartburn (1986), directed by Mike Nichols and based on Nora Ephron’s semi-autobiographical novel about her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein. She was also in Warren Beatty’s comic adventure Dick Tracy and Alan Alda’s comedy Betsy’s Wedding (both 1990).

Most recently, she was impressive in very different roles in two hit TV shows of 2025: as a former studio head modeled after Sony’s Amy Pascal in Seth Rogen’s action comedy The Studio, and in the second season of zombie drama The Last of Us as the protagonist’s therapist, played by Pedro Pascal.

O’Hara’s numerous vocal performances have included Chicken Little (2005), Spike Jonze’s live adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and The Wild Robot (2024). She also provided voices in two stop-motion gothic animated films from Burton’s stable: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), directed by Henry Selick, and Burton’s 2008 feature-length version of his 1984 short Frankenweenie. Her various roles in the latter film included “Weird Girl” – which is a fair description of the niche she has carved for herself.

She is survived by her husband, production designer Beau Welch, whom she met while filming Beetlejuice and whom she married in 1992, and their children, Matthew and Luke, and her six siblings, including singer Mary Margaret O’Hara.