Catherine O’Hara, the comic actress best known for her work on SCTV, films like Home Alone and Best In Show, and the hit sitcom Schitt’s Creek, died on Friday at her Los Angeles home. She was 71.
A rep for O’Hara confirmed her death to Rolling Stone, adding that she died after a brief, unspecified illness.
O’Hara was one of several prominent performers to emerge from the fabled Second City improv comedy troupe in Toronto, alongside Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and Eugene Levy. Her work on the troupe’s hit sketch show, SCTV, earned her an Emmy Award for writing in 1982. Decades later, she’d win a trove of awards — including an Emmy, a Golden Globe, a SAG Award, and a Critics’ Choice Award — for her performance as Moira Rose, the outlandish and loveably out-of-touch former soap opera star she played on Schitt’s Creek.
In between SCTV and Schitt’s Creek, O’Hara appeared in an array of films and TV shows. To many, she was remembered as Kate McCallister, mother of Kevin in the Home Alone series, while she also popped up in movies like Beetlejuice and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. O’Hara was also one of filmmaker Christopher Guest’s go-to actresses, appearing in many of his celebrated comedies, like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration.
Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2020, O’Hara credited her home country of Canada for shaping her sense of humor. Though frequently stereotyped as overly nice, O’Hara argued that Canadians “not only have a sense of humor about others, but also about themselves — which I think is the healthiest and best kind of sense of humor to have.” She continued: “And there’s an edge to it — but with compassion and love — but it’s a good, dark sense of humor, too, in there just because of awareness of the world around you.”
Born March 4, 1954, Catherine Anne O’Hara grew up in Toronto, one of seven kids in what she always described as a hilarious family. “Being funny was highly encouraged in our family,” she told The New Yorker in 2019. “My 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.”
Enraptured by Rowan & Martin’s 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’Hara 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’Hara made her characters feisty and vibrant, which is why she was choosy about who she’d imitate.
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“When we were doing SCTV and someone would say, ‘What about this person? You want to play them in a scene? You want to do her?’ If I didn’t like them, I wouldn’t play them,” O’Hara recalled in a 2019 Vulture profile. “It takes too much of my time and energy.”
As SCTV ended its Emmy-winning run in the mid-1980s, O’Hara started landing small parts in films like After Hours and Heartburn, working with heavyweight directors such as Martin Scorsese and Mike Nichols. But her first major film role was in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, in which she played a pretentious, woeful sculptor who moves into Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis’ 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’s lovelorn Sally.)
But Beetlejuice also led to her memorable turn in 1990’s Home Alone, one of the biggest family movies of its time. Playing the harried mother of Macauley Culkin’s scheming son Kevin, O’Hara became a generation of moviegoers’ ideal image of a loving, concerned matriarch.
“[Director] Chris Columbus and [writer] John Hughes didn’t make me audition for the mom part in Home Alone,” she told Vanity Fair in 2020. “I met with them, and I guess I was close enough to the character, somehow — or they just ignored what I was like in the meeting and hired me anyway.”
In 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’s cast for 2000’s even-better Best in Show, an amusing look at the lives of dog owners determined to win top prize at a dog show. O’Hara 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.
O’Hara would continue to star in Guest’s movies — including 2003’s underrated A Mighty Wind, in which she and Levy sing the Oscar-nominated folk ballad “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” — but her next triumph was Schitt’s 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’s change of fortune, O’Hara won the Emmy in 2020 to go along with the award she took home in 1982 as a writer on SCTV. Schitt’s Creek reminded viewers all over again what a sharp mind she was, excellent at both physical comedy and verbal riffs. Moira was a masterclass of tightly controlled eccentricity, and one of O’Hara’s crowning achievements.
“The exterior always helps make me feel like someone else,” she told Vulture when explaining how she portrayed her Schitt’s Creek character. “For 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’ve taken a bit of all the people I’ve met in the world and I’m sharing it with you.”
O’Hara 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’Hara sought out the funny, especially when she was working alongside people she loved on stage or in front of the camera.
“When you work with collaborative, good and talented people then you do feel safe,” she said in a 2024 Parade interview. “You know that nobody is afraid to turn down an idea, and there’s a sincere goal in making the project as good as possible. My training was also in front of a live audience who didn’t 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.”
From Rolling Stone US
