{"id":447350,"date":"2026-02-01T14:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T14:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/447350\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T14:41:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T14:41:07","slug":"catherine-ohara-obituary-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/447350\/","title":{"rendered":"Catherine O\u2019Hara obituary | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cKevin!\u201d With that panicked exclamation<\/a>, delivered in wide-eyed, straight-to-camera close-up in the festive comedy Home Alone (1990), the actor Catherine O\u2019Hara<\/a>, who has died aged 71 after a short illness, cemented her place as one of cinema\u2019s most neglectful screen parents.<\/p>\n

After inadvertently leaving her young son (played by Macaulay Culkin) behind in Chicago at the mercy of burglars while the rest of the McCallister family flies to Paris for Christmas, O\u2019Hara\u2019s character, Kate, spends the film struggling to get back to him. On her return trip, she accepts a lift from a polka band. Its leader is played by John Candy<\/a>, one of O\u2019Hara\u2019s stablemates \u2013 along with Martin Short, Eugene Levy<\/a> and Gilda Radner \u2013 from her early days in Toronto\u2019s improvisational comedy troupe Second City.<\/p>\n

To misplace a child once may be regarded as a misfortune. To do so twice looks like carelessness. Then again, plausibility is no match for the pressure to repeat a $477m hit \u2013 and so it was that Kevin was again estranged from his family in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992). O\u2019Hara transformed maternal despair into frantic comedy once more.<\/p>\n

The role brought her fame but was not typical of her work. Eccentrics suffused with vanity, mischief or vulnerability were much more O\u2019Hara\u2019s style.<\/p>\n

Before Home Alone, she had found a wide audience in Tim Burton\u2019s comedy Beetlejuice (1988)<\/a>. She played Delia Deetz, a pretentious sculptor who moves with her husband and stepdaughter into a creaky Connecticut house whose previous occupants \u2013 now ghosts \u2013 plot to evict them.<\/p>\n

In the film\u2019s standout sequence, the family and their dinner party guests are suddenly possessed and forced to sing and dance to Harry Belafonte<\/a>\u2019s calypso hit Day-O (the Banana Boat Song). As the first to be turned into a kind of human marionette, O\u2019Hara\u2019s blend of horror, embarrassment and slow-dawning rapture is a delirious slapstick joy<\/a>. In her review of the film, the critic Pauline Kael<\/a> singled out the actor\u2019s \u201csexy evil eyes\u201d and called her \u201cthe possessor of the freakiest blue-eyed stare since early Gene Wilder\u201d. O\u2019Hara returned as Delia in the sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), roaming the underworld after being fatally bitten by asps.<\/p>\n

Catherine O\u2019Hara and Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, 1990. Her panicked cry of \u2018Kevin!\u2019 became world famous. Photograph: 20th Century Fox\/Allstar<\/p>\n

The most deranged of O\u2019Hara\u2019s creations, however, was Moira Rose in the popular sitcom Schitt\u2019s Creek (2015-20). This grande dame, former soap star and woman of many wigs, each of them named, is reduced to sharing cramped rooms in an Ontario motel with her doting husband and two spoilt adult children after the family loses its fortune. Dreaming of recapturing her former opulence and status, she hitches her wagon to dubious projects including a horror sequel called The Crows Have Eyes 3: The Crowening<\/a> and a commercial for ghastly fruit wine<\/a> (\u201cIt tastes like amoxicillin\u201d) in which an increasingly sozzled Moira mangles the vintner\u2019s name in ever more tongue-twisted ways.<\/p>\n

Instances of her cuckoo behaviour across the show\u2019s six series were innumerable, her couture wardrobe incongruous in the folksy setting, her accent mystifyingly wayward: she might airily pronounce her son David\u2019s name as \u201cDare-vid\u201d, or render \u201cbaby\u201d as \u201cbare-bare\u201d. For O\u2019Hara, this verbal crazy-paving was part of the point. \u201cWhen people try to imitate that character,\u201d she said, \u201cthe mistake they make is to be consistent.\u201d Still, Moira was rarely less than a loving mother. \u201cWhat have I told you about putting your body on the internet?\u201d she asks her daughter in one episode. \u201cNever! Never without proper lighting.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Hara 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\u2019Hara and Eugene Levy, who briefly dated in their improv days, also sparked together magically in four astute and exceptionally funny films directed by Christopher Guest<\/a> and co-written by him and Levy.<\/p>\n

Waiting for Guffman (1996) concerns a Missouri am-dram society whose members believe that their new musical celebrating local history (there is a production number about the manufacture of foot-stools) has Broadway potential. In keeping with the film\u2019s genial tone, O\u2019Hara\u2019s evident love for her character, a travel agent and atrocious actor, generates a warmth that precludes cruelty.<\/p>\n

Catherine O\u2019Hara in the US television comedy Schitt\u2019s Creek, 2019. Photograph: CBC\/ITV\/Kobal\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

In Best in Show (2000), she and Levy play a married couple whose trip with their terrier to a dog show is beset with problems, beginning when a lack of funds sees them downgraded at their hotel from a suite to a broom cupboard.<\/p>\n

They were a couple again, albeit estranged, in A Mighty Wind (2003)<\/a>, about a memorial concert of folk musicians. Reunited for the gig, their characters Mitch and Mickey provide the touching emotional undercurrent of this silly but painstakingly authentic film, before going their separate ways. O\u2019Hara, as Mickey, is last seen performing a song about catheters at a medical supplies trade show.<\/p>\n

For Your Consideration (2006) <\/a>was the only one of her films with Guest not to adopt the mockumentary format, though it was no less hilarious for that. O\u2019Hara is the humble veteran whose head is turned by rumours that she may receive an Oscar nomination for playing a dying matriarch in a modest indie drama. Soon, she is wearing red leather numbers and undergoing plastic surgery that fixes her mouth in a rictus grin. The part played to O\u2019Hara\u2019s speciality: the comedy of delusion.<\/p>\n

While the structure and plot points of Guest\u2019s films were committed to paper, the lion\u2019s share of the material was improvised by the cast, and it was not unusual for the finished 90-minute product to have emerged from as many as 60 hours of raw footage.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, the most rewarding improvising is having agreed on an idea beforehand, where the scene might go, who your character is, or what might possibly be funny about your character, and at the same time be completely open to the other people because you\u2019re not alone,\u201d O\u2019Hara said.<\/p>\n

In his book Improv Nation, Sam Wasson calls her \u201cone of the most fluid improvisers of her generation. Others may be crazier; none were as elegantly at ease.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was born and raised in Toronto, the sixth of seven children. Her mother was an estate agent and her father worked for Canadian Pacific Railways. Their sense of humour, she said, informed hers. \u201cMy father told great jokes he brought home from the office and my mother imitated everybody. I like to think I\u2019m a combination.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was educated at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute, Toronto, and auditioned for the Second City company only to end up as a waitress. Eventually, she was appointed understudy for Radner, who was dating O\u2019Hara\u2019s brother. Explaining her initial approach to improv, O\u2019Hara said: \u201cMy crutch was \u2026 when in doubt, play insane. Because you didn\u2019t have to excuse anything that came out of your mouth. It didn\u2019t have to make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Between 1976 and 1984, the sketch show SCTV, a television spin-off of Second City, became a cult success, earning O\u2019Hara and her fellow writer-performers an Emmy in 1982.<\/p>\n

In Martin Scorsese\u2019s zippy black comedy After Hours (1985), she drove an ice-cream van through Manhattan as part of the nocturnal hunt for the film\u2019s hero, a computer programmer falsely suspected of murder. She was a gossipy journalist in Heartburn (1986), directed by Mike Nichols<\/a> and based on Nora Ephron<\/a>\u2019s semi-autobiographical novel about her marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein. She was also in Warren Beatty\u2019s comic-strip adventure Dick Tracy and Alan Alda\u2019s comedy Betsy\u2019s Wedding (both 1990).<\/p>\n

Most recently, she was impressive in very different roles in two 2025 TV hits: as a former studio boss modelled on Sony\u2019s Amy Pascal in Seth Rogen\u2019s film-industry comedy The Studio, and in the second season of the zombie drama The Last of Us as therapist to the hero, played by Pedro Pascal.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Hara\u2019s many voice performances included Chicken Little (2005), Spike Jonze\u2019s live-action 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 the Burton stable: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), directed by Henry Selick, and Burton\u2019s 2008 feature-length version of his own 1984 short Frankenweenie. Her various roles in the latter included \u201cWeird Girl\u201d \u2013 a fair description of the niche she carved for herself.<\/p>\n

She is survived by her husband, the production designer Bo Welch, whom she met on the set of Beetlejuice and married in 1992, by their children, Matthew and Luke, and her six siblings, including the singer Mary Margaret O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n

Catherine Anne O\u2019Hara, actor, born 4 March 1954; died 30 January 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cKevin!\u201d With that panicked exclamation, delivered in wide-eyed, straight-to-camera close-up in the festive comedy Home Alone (1990), the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-447350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}