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Her nearly 50-year career seamlessly crossed between movies and television. During that span, Canadian-born actress Catherine O’Hara created many memorable comedic characters while winning over audiences with just a single name: “Kevin!” A native of Toronto, Ontario, O’Hara was born in March of 1954. Her career in comedy began at age 20 when she joined the local company of the Second City Theatre troupe, whose roster at the time included the likes of Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and Gilda Radner.
When Second City TV began in 1976, Catherine would be among the stage regulars making the jump to the small screen as a performer/writer. Along with cutting impersonations of everyone from Katharine Hepburn and Meryl Streep to Tammy Faye Bakker and Brooke Shields, she also created such unforgettable characters as booze-loving singer/dancer Lola Heatherton (a send-up of Joey Heatherton), bawdy stand-up comedienne Dusty Towne (based on “party record” favorite Rusty Warren), and clueless quiz show loser Margaret Meehan, who had a knack for prematurely pushing the buzzer and giving host Alex Trebek (Levy) the wrong answers to his unasked questions (“Cheese omelets, Alex?” “The Dewey Decimal System?”).
Her big screen debut came with small roles in a pair of 1980 features, the Anthony Perkins thriller Double Negative and a romantic comedy with Donald Sutherland and Suzanne Somers, Nothing Personal. O’Hara signed with Saturday Night Live for the 1981-82 season, only to back out without ever appearing (She would get to host the show twice in 1991-92, though). She also said goodbye to SCTV as a regular in 1982 to continue her film career.
Her first key role came in director Martin Scorsese’s 1985 dark comedy After Hours, where she played an ice cream truck driver who is among the “troubled” women Manhattan office worker Griffin Dunne encounters one wild night in Soho. The following year she was a Washington Beltway gossip maven opposite Streep and Jack Nicholson in Heartburn. 1988 would find O’Hara playing one of her most memorable “mom” roles as would-be sculptor Delia Deetz, whose daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) befriends the ghosts (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) haunting their new home, in Tim Burton’s supernatural romp Beetlejuice. It was on the Beetlejuice set that she met her future husband, production designer Bo Welch. Catherine got to reprise her role three decades later in 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Supporting turns in such films as Betsy’s Wedding, Dick Tracy, and Wyatt Earp followed, as did a voice role on the animated series The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, as the sexy neighbor of fellow SCTV alum Martin Short’s title character. 1990, however, was the year Catherine cemented herself in the pop culture consciousness when she was cast as Kate McCallister, the frazzled Paris-bound wife and mother who inadvertently leaves eight-year-old son Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) Home Alone. 1993 found her performing the voice of Sally, the patchwork girlfriend of “pumpkin king” Jack Skellington, in producer Burton’s 1993 stop-motion Yuletide gem The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Director/co-writer Christopher Guest would sign Catherine to play opposite Fred Willard as one-half of a husband/wife amateur thespian team in his 1996 film Waiting for Guffman. Along with Willard, SCTV colleague Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Parker Posey and other actors, O’Hara would become part of Guest’s gifted repertoire company–improvising much of their on-screen dialogue based on outlines and background info supplied by the filmmaker and co-writer Levy–in the critically acclaimed “mockumentaries” Best in Show, A Mighty Wind (which, like Nightmare, gave her a chance to demonstrate her singing abilities), and For Your Consideration.
In the 2000s-2020s Catherine would continue doing voice work for animated features (Chicken Little, Where the Wild Things Are, The Addams Family, Elemental) along with co-starring in such live-action films as Killers and Temple Grandin (the latter earning her an Emmy nomination). She also did guest shots on the HBO series Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Last of Us. In 2015 she and Levy reunited for the acclaimed Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, in which she played Moira, a former soap star and the matriarch of the once-wealthy Rose family, now reduced to living in the remote title town. The role would win her an Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy in 2020. O’Hara’s final small-screen role came alongside Seth Rogen in the funnyman’s acerbic 2025 Hollywood send-up The Studio. On January 30 the actress passed away in Los Angeles following a brief illness.
MovieFanFare looks back fondly at Catherine O’Hara’s many film and TV roles, and for this week’s poll we invite you to vote for your favorite from among her performances. If we didn’t list your pick, please tell us about it in the comments below.