Catherine O’Hara, R.I.P.

From ‘SCTV’ to ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ she brought exquisite timing and surprising layers even to the silliest characters.

Catherine O’Hara at SXSW 2025 in March 2025. (Photo by Robby Klein/Getty Images for IMDb)

CATHERINE O’HARA, THE COMIC ACTRESS best known for her roles as Kevin’s mom in the Home Alone franchise and as Moira Rose, the flighty, oblivious, self-centered matriarch in the Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, died today at 71.

O’Hara was born in Toronto in 1954 into a big Irish-Catholic family—she was one of seven children. “I didn’t go to college, unless you call Second City [a] university of comedy,” she said, referring to Toronto’s famous improv comedy group, which she joined shortly after high school. In the early 1970s, Second City featured Dan Aykroyd, Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty, Bill Murray and his brother Brian Doyle-Murray, and Gilda Radner. Radner, eight years O’Hara’s senior, was chiefly responsible for shepherding O’Hara into this world: Radner had dated O’Hara’s brother, befriended her, and trained her as an understudy at Second City.

Members of the troupe would come and go, and eventually a core group that included O’Hara, Thomas, Flaherty, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis, Andrea Martin, John Candy, and others, would join together and launch a landmark sketch comedy show, which over the course of its eight years, would bounce from the CBC to NBC to pay cable and back. But it was a brilliant show—SCTV is to Canadian comedy what Monty Python is to British comedy. The premise was that SCTV was a cable network, and the sketches on each episode (the run-time of the episodes also fluctuated over the years, from thirty minutes to ninety) could be made up of shows that were airing on the network, or they could be brief commercials for shows that were never going to air—that is, become full sketches—or they could focus on behind-the-scenes shenanigans. The upshot is it allowed all performers to play a wide range of characters and tackle varied celebrity impressions.

But O’Hara, along with Andrea Martin, struggled to be recognized among the cast, and to be treated as equals. As she told Dave Thomas for his book SCTV: Behind the Scenes:

I have a mix of good and bad feelings about those early days only because Andrea and I were not hired as writers to begin with. And it was so arbitrary. I did get the feeling of being less worthy. It’s like starting with a handicap. Andrea and I were there every day. We did write. Our job was to write, but we were not paid as writers.

However, O’Hara’s unmistakable gifts as a comic actress secured for her a career in film and television. This was not least because her range on SCTV was so vast: Whether she’s wallowing in the almost grotesque absurdity of Lola Heatherton (“This is my first Christmas in love!”), or providing a rather subtle riff on Liv Ullmann in the already unlikely Ingmar Bergman parody “Whispers of the Wolf,” I haven’t seen a performance given by O’Hara, comedic or otherwise, that she didn’t absolutely nail. Without her performance as Kevin’s mother, half the tension of Home Alone (1990) would be gone. O’Hara plays it at just the right level: She makes the character’s panic believable but not so gut-wrenching that the film suddenly stops being a comedy. Or look at her in Beetlejuice (1988), in which her very of-the-time satirical character—a snobby, self-absorbed artist with more contacts than talent—goes from an anxious attempt to hide that her house is haunted from her high society friends (“Kids! You know I love ’em!”), to a scheming exploiter, to a loving wife and mother, all in about ninety minutes—and O’Hara pulls it off. There’s always a grasping, desperate humanity to her characters, even the ones that make the audience uncomfortable.

Because she was so excellent at comedy, some filmmakers judged that maybe she could do other things as well, and she started taking on dramatic roles, such as Allie Earp, Virgil Earp’s highly dubious wife, in Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp; opposite Steve Martin in his only mildly comic updating of Silas Marner; and as part of the ensemble in Ron Howard’s The Paper. Along the way, she also lent her talents to avowed SCTV fan Martin Scorsese for his film After Hours (1985), as one of the many nutjobs who horribly complicate Griffin Dunne’s night.

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THE FRIENDSHIPS AND WORKING RELATIONSHIPS that O’Hara made early in her career continued to provide her not only with work over the years but with good parts, ones that allowed her to show what an invaluable comedic talent she was. She had a starring role in Christopher Guest’s largely improvised Waiting for Guffman (1996)—a fake documentary about a local production of a musical, which has my single favorite performance of hers. O’Hara plays Sheila Albertson, who, with her husband, the sort of benevolently tyrannical Ron Albertson (Fred Willard), have visions of escaping their small town and heading to Broadway. I won’t get into the whole thing, but while the pair is respected for their gifts in little Blaine, Missouri (“We like to think of ourselves as the Lunts of Blaine”), neither of them is any good. But O’Hara is great, and she does a couple of really remarkable things: In the scene where she and Willard are dining at a Chinese restaurant with Eugene Levy and his character’s wife, played by Linda Kash, O’Hara gives one of the finest drunk performances (“We’re talking about Miami, er . . . we’re talking about China now”), comedic or otherwise, I’ve ever seen, though of course given the portrait of the Albertson marriage the audience has been given, what O’Hara is doing, funny as it is, isn’t entirely comedic; and she also, when she takes the stage as part of the cast of Red, White, and Blaine, the musical devised by Guest’s Corky St. Clair to celebrate the town’s sesquicentennial, gives one of the best bad performances I’ve ever seen. It’s really incredible how good at pretending to be a terrible actress she was. The way she punches the line “California will be a sight for these weary eyes” is a brilliant mashup of bad choices and ignored instincts all flooding through Sheila Albertson.

Waiting for Guffman became a modest hit, and O’Hara would go on to appear in all of the subsequent Guest-directed and Guest-and-Levy-outlined improv comedies, most popularly in Best in Show (2000), in which O’Hara plays the somewhat more aggressive and outgoing wife to Levy’s dork, though the two are united in their love of their Norwich terrier. She’s especially impressive in A Mighty Wind, about the staging of a public-broadcasting reunion of old folk singers, in which she not only essentially plays the straight woman to Levy’s absurd burnout, she also had to sing and learn the autoharp. It’s a very funny movie, but O’Hara and Levy form the emotional core, and O’Hara plays the melancholy of their relationship beautifully. O’Hara also plays a note that suggests hers is the only character in the movie who on some level understands how preposterous this all is.

O’Hara’s last major part was as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek (2015–2020), opposite Levy again as her husband (the show was created by Eugene Levy’s son, Dan Levy, who costars), where she plays a woman full to bursting with absolute nonsense, a nonsense that intensifies the deeper into crisis she falls. This could be said to be O’Hara’s sweet spot, comedically: playing someone who lives in the same world as we all do, but on some level is untethered from reality, and is therefore easily overwhelmed by it. When faced with a problem, she usually chooses to plow ahead as before.

Take out the obliviousness—Catherine O’Hara, with her brilliantly layered comic performances, was never oblivious—and this is sort of how she herself approached performing: Whether or not she was ever given the appropriate credit, she would continue on giving one outstanding performance after another, finding emotional truths even in the silliest moments of the most ridiculous characters.