Schitt’s Creek, Home Alone star Catherine O’Hara dies at 71
Emmy-winning actress played a permanently embarassed millionaire in Schitt’s Creek and Macaulay Culkin’s mother in the Home Alone films
Catherine O’Hara, a gifted Canadian-born comic actress and SCTV alum who starred as Macaulay Culkin’s harried mother in two Home Alone films and won an Emmy as the dramatically ditsy wealthy matriarch Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek died on Friday. She was 71.
O’Hara died at her home in Los Angeles “following a brief illness”, according to a statement from her agency, Creative Artists Agency. Further details were not immediately available.
O’Hara’s career was launched at the Second City in Toronto in the 1970s. It was there that she first worked with Eugene Levy, who would become a lifelong collaborator – and her Schitt’s Creek co-star.
The two would be among the original cast of the sketch show SCTV, short for Second City Television. The series, which began on Canadian television in the 1970s and aired on NBC in the US in the early ’80s, spawned a legendary group of esoteric comedians including Martin Short, John Candy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis and Joe Flaherty.
Hollywood did not entirely know what to do with O’Hara and her scattershot style. She played oddball supporting characters in Martin Scorsese’s 1985 After Hours and Tim Burton’s 1988 Beetlejuice – a role she would reprise in the 2024 sequel.
She played it mostly straight as a horrified mother who accidentally abandoned her child in the two Home Alone movies. The films were among the biggest box office earners of the early 1990s and their Christmas setting made them television perennials.