CATHERINE O’HARA

(4 March 1954 - 30 January 2026)

The Canadian-American actress Catherine O’Hara, who has died aged 71 following a short illness, was also a comedian and screenwriter. Although her forte was comedy, she proved to be a fine dramatic actress as well, winning many awards, and such was her esteem that she was invested into the Order of Canada. She will probably be best remembered for the first two films in the Home Alone series and for the sitcom Schitt’s Creek. However, in a fifty-year career she appeared in an amazing amount of work, including Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – as well as in the mockumentary comedies of Christopher Guest and much voice work. O’Hara was no stranger to television, either, culminating with Schitt’s Creek and, latterly, The Studio in which she played the former studio head Patty Leigh. Showing how much she was appreciated, many tributes were forthcoming, from fellow Canadians Michael Bublé and Mark Carney, Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Ben Stiller, Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, and of course from Macaulay Culkin, who played Kevin in the first two Home Alone films.

Catherine Anne O’Hara was born the sixth of seven children in Toronto to a Catholic family of Irish descent, her father being a railway worker and her mother an estate agent. She graduated from Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute in 1974 and began her career with the Second City improv group in Toronto, initially to understudy Gilda Radner. She then appeared in Beetlejuice as a crazy sculptress who, with her family, becomes possessed by ghosts. O’Hara’s specialty was in playing crazy characters, delusionists who are unaware of their madness. She was to repeat this trait in many of the roles she played in the future – right up to Schitt’s Creek in which she was a grand lady forced to downsize and live in a relative hovel. Her performance won her an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

Improvised comedy was at the heart of O’Hara’s talents. When she worked with Christopher Guest, a screenplay was never completely fixed. With Guest she did Waiting for Guffman about amateur musical dramatics, A Mighty Wind which was set backstage at a folk band convention, Best in Show about a national dog show and their pet owners, and For Your Consideration which had a movie-making background. Guest called Catherine O’Hara a comic giant. She was also adept at voice-over work for which she did The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicken Little, Over the Hedge, Monster House, Frankenweenie and The Wild Robot.

Catherine O’Hara met her husband, the production designer Bo Welch, on the set of Beetlejuice and they married in 1992. They have two sons, Luke and Matthew. She was a great actress, a great comedian but mostly, by all accounts, a great lady.

MICHAEL DARVELL