Catherine O’Hara, comedic screen legend

‘Catherine O’Hara is beyond funny,” wrote Lynn Hirschberg in a 1983 Rolling Stone magazine interview with the young Canadian actor. “She makes you laugh, yes, and her acting is certainly comedic, but O’Hara is not funny in the raucous National Lampoon or Saturday Night Live tradition…

“Hers is, instead, the comedy of negative space, of sinking so deeply into a character that even silences are defining,” Hirschberg added in an article that was partly trying to solve a mystery: why had O’Hara suddenly dropped out of her regular spot on the very popular satirical show Second City Television (SCTV)?

This weekend the unexpected death at 71 of the Emmy-award-winning star of Home Alone and Schitt’s Creek foreseeably prompted emotional tributes from many co-stars and admirers, including Macaulay Culkin, Pedro Pascal, Seth Rogen and Tim Burton, who directed her in Beetlejuice. But the tone of many tributes has also been marked by a sorrowful sense that O’Hara had been slightly forgotten by the industry during the middle stretch of her long career. Her stylish comic presence was placed centre stage again, perhaps rather too late.

“We are at a loss for words at the passing of our friend,” said Rogen, her co-star on his hit Netflix sitcom The Studio. “She was a hero to all of us, and we pinched ourselves every day that we got to work with her.

“She was somehow classy, warm, and hilarious all at the same time,” his statement added.

Writer and actor Eugene Levy – her close friend, improv colleague and screen husband on Schitt’s Creek – also conveyed his grief. “Words seem inadequate to express the loss I feel today. I had the honour of knowing and working with the great Catherine O’Hara for over 50 years.”

Culkin, who played O’Hara’s son in the family blockbuster Home Alone in 1990, posted a tribute to his “Mama” on Instagram. “I thought we had time,” he wrote. “I wanted more. I wanted to sit in a chair next to you.” The former child star posted photographs of the two together on the Home Alone set next to more recent shots of O’Hara in December 2023 during the ceremony for the belated cementing of his Hollywood Walk of Fame star. Their Home Alone co-star Joe Pesci called O’Hara “a great actress”.

On Friday, O’Hara’s manager confirmed news of her death in Los Angeles after the brief illness that cut short the late bloom of her lengthy career. In 2020 she won an Emmy for playing the insecure, ageing society belle Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek, but she was also a double best supporting actress nominee in 2025, earning recognition for her work on both HBO’s second season of The Last of Us and for her portrayal of a steely veteran Hollywood producer in The Studio.

O’Hara was born in Toronto in 1954, attending Catholic schools until the eighth grade, when she went on to public school, partly attracted by the boys and the opportunity to perform in musicals. She joined the Second City company at 20 after working as a waiter in the Chicago-based group’s Toronto club alongside her sister, Mary Margaret. Initially she had been asked to understudy Gilda Radner, but she moved into the main cast when Radner left to join the original Saturday Night Live team.

In 1976 the Toronto troupe launched a television sketch show on Canada’s Global network. The starry cast of writers and performers included Levy, John Candy, Andrea Martin and Harold Ramis. Rick Moranis and Martin Short joined later, and NBC picked up the show and ran it in the US.

But for younger TV viewers, O’Hara’s turn as the distraught mother in Home Alone has now been overshadowed by her comic turns in Schitt’s Creek and The Studio, and by her moving performance alongside Pascal in The Last of Us. He posted a photograph of them working together and wrote: “Oh, genius to be near you. Eternally grateful.”

Christopher Guest, the co-creator of the rock spoof This is Spinal Tap, and a longtime collaborator of O’Hara’s on films including Best in Show and For Your Consideration, released a statement this weekend speaking of his “devastation”, adding: “We have lost one of the comic giants of our age.” Burton wrote a Facebook tribute next to a photograph of the cast of his 2024 follow-up to Beetlejuice.

Canadian singer Michael Bublé hailed O’Hara as an “ambassador” for their country. “As an artist, she inspired me more than she’ll ever know,” he wrote on Instagram. “She set the bar for what it means to represent your country with excellence and grace and all without ever losing warmth or humility.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone at the age of 29, O’Hara said she regarded her comedic gift as a piece of good fortune. “I think everyone is born with humor,” she suggested, “but your life can beat it out of you, sadly, or you can be lucky enough to grow up in it.” And in explaining her surprising decision to leave her starring role on SCTV the previous year, she said: “It just wasn’t fun anymore… We did the TV show from six in the morning until two or three at night. I’m like everyone else – I want to get married and have kids. And married people on SCTV never saw their spouses.”

O’Hara leaves her husband of three decades, Bo Welch, the production designer she met while working on Beetlejuice, and their sons Matthew, 31, and Luke, 28.

Catherine O’Hara was born on 4 March 1954 and died on 30 January 2026, aged 71

Photograph by Robby Klein/Getty Images for IMDb