{"id":439558,"date":"2026-01-30T21:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T21:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/439558\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T21:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T21:07:09","slug":"catherine-ohara-star-of-sctv-schitts-creek-dead-at-71","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/439558\/","title":{"rendered":"Catherine O’Hara, Star of ‘SCTV,’ ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ Dead at 71"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCatherine O\u2019Hara, the comic actress best known for her work on SCTV<\/a>, films like Home Alone and Best In Show, and the hit sitcom Schitt\u2019s Creek<\/a>, died on today at her Los Angeles home. She was 71.<\/p>\n

\n\tA rep for O\u2019Hara confirmed her death to\u00a0Rolling Stone, adding that she died after a brief, unspecified illness.<\/p>\n

\n\tO\u2019Hara was one of several prominent performers to emerge from the fabled Second City<\/a> improv comedy troupe in Toronto, alongside Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and Eugene Levy. Her work on the troupe\u2019s hit sketch show, SCTV, earned her an Emmy Award for writing in 1982. Decades later, she\u2019d win a trove of awards \u2014 including an Emmy, a Golden Globe, a SAG Award, and a Critics\u2019 Choice Award \u2014 for her performance as Moira Rose, the outlandish and loveably out-of-touch former soap opera star she played on Schitt\u2019s Creek.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn between SCTV and Schitt\u2019s Creek, O\u2019Hara appeared in an array of films and TV shows. To many, she was remembered as Kate McCallister, mother of Kevin in the\u00a0Home Alone\u00a0series, while she also popped up in movies like\u00a0Beetlejuice<\/a>\u00a0and Martin Scorsese\u2019s\u00a0After Hours. O\u2019Hara was also one of filmmaker Christopher Guest\u2019s go-to actresses, appearing in many of his celebrated comedies, like Waiting for Guffman<\/a>, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking with Rolling Stone<\/a> in 2020, O\u2019Hara credited her home country of Canada for shaping her sense of humor. Though frequently stereotyped as overly nice, O\u2019Hara argued that Canadians \u201cnot only have a sense of humor about others, but also about themselves \u2014 which I think is the healthiest and best kind of sense of humor to have.\u201d She continued: \u201cAnd there\u2019s an edge to it \u2014 but with compassion and love \u2014 but it\u2019s a good, dark sense of humor, too, in there just because of awareness of the world around you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn March 4, 1954, Catherine Anne O\u2019Hara grew up in Toronto, one of seven kids in what she always described as a hilarious family. \u201cBeing funny was highly encouraged in our family,\u201d she told The New Yorker in 2019<\/a>. \u201cMy dad would tell jokes, and my mom would tell stories and imitate everyone within the stories. I think everyone is born with humor, but your life can beat it out of you, sadly, or you can be lucky enough to grow up in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tEnraptured by Rowan & Martin\u2019s Laugh-In as a child, she started performing in the Second City improv troupe when she was 20, meeting future longtime collaborators such as Short and Levy. In 1976, O\u2019Hara was in the initial cast for SCTV, which brought Second City to television, serving as a looser, edgier version of Saturday Night Live, which had debuted on American TV the year before. SCTV allowed the world to see her gift for impressions, which she had enjoyed doing since girlhood, nailing spot-on takes of stars like Elizabeth Taylor. O\u2019Hara made her characters feisty and vibrant, which is why she was choosy about who she\u2019d imitate.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen we were doing SCTV and someone would say, \u2018What about this person? You want to play them in a scene? You want to do her?\u2019 If I didn\u2019t like them, I wouldn\u2019t play them,\u201d O\u2019Hara recalled in a 2019 Vulture profile<\/a>. \u201cIt takes too much of my time and energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs SCTV ended its Emmy-winning run in the mid-1980s, O\u2019Hara started landing small parts in films like After Hours and Heartburn, working with heavyweight directors such as Scorsese and Mike Nichols. But her first major film role was in Tim Burton\u2019s Beetlejuice, in which she played a pretentious, woeful sculptor who moves into Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis\u2019 home after their death. The hit horror-comedy, which showed off her brash comic energy, started a long working relationship with Burton that would include future projects like The Nightmare Before Christmas. (She got to show off her wonderful singing voice as that stop-motion film\u2019s lovelorn Sally.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\tBut Beetlejuice also led to her memorable turn in 1990\u2019s Home Alone, one of the biggest family movies of its time. Playing the harried mother of Macauley Culkin\u2019s scheming son Kevin, O\u2019Hara became a generation of moviegoers\u2019 ideal image of a loving, concerned matriarch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c[Director] Chris Columbus and [writer] John Hughes didn\u2019t make me audition for the mom part in Home Alone,\u201d she told Vanity Fair in 2020<\/a>. \u201cI met with them, and I guess I was close enough to the character, somehow \u2014 or they just ignored what I was like in the meeting and hired me anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the mid-1990s, she teamed up with a fellow ace improviser, Christopher Guest, and her old friend Levy to star in Waiting for Guffman. In the beloved mockumentary, she played a travel agent married to Fred Willard, with both of them set to act in a new, terrible small-town musical known as Red, White and Blaine. Guest reunited much of Waiting for Guffman\u2019s cast for 2000\u2019s even-better Best in Show, an amusing look at the lives of dog owners determined to win top prize at a dog show. O\u2019Hara and Levy portrayed a married couple facing tough times who, along with being very funny, conveyed such sweetness that audiences rooted for these endearing underdogs.<\/p>\n

\n\tO\u2019Hara would continue to star in Guest\u2019s movies \u2014 including 2003\u2019s underrated A Mighty Wind, in which she and Levy sing the Oscar-nominated folk ballad \u201cA Kiss at the End of the Rainbow\u201d \u2014 but her next triumph was Schitt\u2019s Creek, which started in 2015 as an under-the-radar gem that eventually became a critical and cultural sensation. As the impossibly self-centered, delightfully deluded Moira Rose, a onetime soap star who cannot accept her family\u2019s change of fortune, O\u2019Hara won the Emmy in 2020 to go along with the award she took home in 1982 as a writer on SCTV. Schitt\u2019s Creek reminded viewers all over again what a sharp mind she was, excellent at both physical comedy and verbal riffs. Moira was a master class of tightly controlled eccentricity, and one of O\u2019Hara\u2019s crowning achievements.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe exterior always helps make me feel like someone else,\u201d she told Vulture when explaining how she portrayed her Schitt\u2019s Creek character. \u201cFor Moira, I get my hair done, I get my makeup, I get those clothes on. They make me stand differently and walk differently. I explain the voice as souvenirs from all my world travel. I\u2019ve taken a bit of all the people I\u2019ve met in the world, and I\u2019m sharing it with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tO\u2019Hara would later receive Emmy nominations in 2025 for her work on The Studio and The Last of Us, recognition of her ability to play both comedy and drama. But from an early age when she relished making her dad laugh by doing impressions, O\u2019Hara sought out the funny, especially when she was working alongside people she loved onstage or in front of the camera.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen you work with collaborative, good and talented people then you do feel safe,\u201d she said in a 2024 Parade interview<\/a>. \u201cYou know that nobody is afraid to turn down an idea, and there\u2019s a sincere goal in making the project as good as possible. My training was also in front of a live audience who didn\u2019t have a phone held up to the stage, and they could only tell their friends and family about it. So I loved having the freedom to fail.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Catherine O\u2019Hara, the comic actress best known for her work on SCTV, films like Home Alone and Best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[62914,236,88,13441,207428],"class_list":{"0":"post-439558","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-catherine-ohara","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-obituary","12":"tag-second-city"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}