What most people do not know is that Catherine is bearing 50 percent of that film. That is what director Chris Columbus referred to doing when Catherine O’Hara was performing in the film, Home Alone, a fact that her laughs were actually best done with the silent effort of making something seem real.
O’Hara passed away at the age of 71 in her Los Angeles house after a short illness, her agency, CAA, announced. She was going to have a private celebration of life with her family.
To those who have watched her before as Kate McAllister whipping her way through airport terminals in Home Alone, or as Delia Deetz floating through the gothic weirdness of Beetlejuice, the joke is not all that OHara was ever good at. She had acted panic, without making it sound like that, vanity without flattening it into cruelty, and affection without taking the harsh edges out of it. The decisions she made made her characters re-playable: familiar, quotable and yet, somehow unknown.
That style was formed as her career began at Toronto Second City, which she joined in 1974 and soon developed SCTV, the sketch comedy that spawned a society of character-based comedy. She received an Emmy as a writer on “SCTV” and received other nominations, but her power was not running as her will with awards, but with craftsmanship. Growing up watching the show, Chicago actors mentioned it as some sort of secret schooling, some midnight lesson on how an actor could turn into dozens of people without even announcing the metamorphosis. Second City executive Kelly Leonard referred to her as the most kind, generous human being, and also recalls how O’Hara would be able to wait out a room and deliver a barb at the right moment as well.
Her film career extended that character work into a more naturalistic register in particularly the mockumentary-type work with Christopher Guest on such films as Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. During such performances, O’Hara would use absurdity as a backdrop instead of a punchline, and little changes of position and voice would do the work. The outcome was comedy constructed on observation, rather than on volume.
Among her latest cultural heights came decades later than the years of “SCTV” when she took part with Eugene Levy and Daniel Levy on the show Schitts Creek. O’Hara had confessed that she was intimidated by the show at first, but was attracted by the respect given to the Levys, her grandeur, woundedness, theatricality, and oddly sweet nature. Moira Rose, who was such a grand, wounded, theatrical, bizarrely tender, soon became iconic of how a character can be all ridiculous and familiar at the same time. O’Hara received an Emmy and an Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2020 and a Golden Globe in that category afterward.
Her work influenced colleagues more human than professional. Dan Levy said that she was already a part of the family way before she saw one on the screen. Her co-star, Michael Keaton (Beetlejuice) referred to her as my real life, true friend. Macaulay Culkin, who returns with her on the occasion of his Hollywood Walk of Fame star unveiling in 2023, wrote: Mama. I thought we had time.
O’Hara gave her own speech as well about being a person with a rare congenital condition, dextrocardia with situs inversus, or a mirror-image position of some organs that is normally harmless. She made a joke about the realization that followed medical tests and x-rays, and her tone remains light even when talking about something intimate, in a 2020 interview.
In 1992, she was married to the production designer Bo Welch whom she met on Beetlejuice. She leaves Welch, their sons Matthew and Luke and her siblings.
Over 50 years, OHara had left behind the greatest brand name of all, accuracy without the impression of trying, comedy that allowed anxiousness, sensitivity and vanity to co-exist, and characters who could be loved without being stereotyped.
