Catherine O’Hara, the comedian who walked out on SNL and found Moira Rose at sixty

Catherine O'Hara

Photo: John Sears / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 4, 1954 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died	January 30, 2026 (71)
Occupation	Actress and comedian
Known for	The Wild Robot, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Home Alone
Awards	Emmy (shared) · Genie · Emmy · Golden Globe · SAG Award · Actor · Officer of the Order of Canada

Most of the world knows Catherine O’Hara as a mother shouting her son’s name on a transatlantic flight, the moment in Home Alone when Kate McCallister realises she has left Kevin behind. It is the plainest thing she ever did on screen. The rest of her work lived in the margins of other people’s stories: a washed-up singer on Canadian sketch television, a dog-show wife whose former lovers keep turning up in Best in Show, a veteran actress chasing awards gossip in For Your Consideration. She spent most of her career as the funniest person in the ensemble and almost never the name above it, and when a lead finally came, as the ruined soap star Moira Rose, she built it out of wigs, archaic vocabulary and an accent nobody could place.

That pattern was a choice more often than an accident. When Saturday Night Live hired her during a rebuild, she quit before ever appearing on air and went home to Toronto and Second City Television. The story told for years was a clash with the writer Michael O’Donoghue; O’Hara denied it and said she simply did not want to live in New York. The improvisers she came up with remained her company for the rest of her life, and the people who cast her best were usually the ones who had once stood beside her on a stage.

Toronto made her. Catherine Anne O’Hara arrived on March 4, 1954, the sixth of seven children in an Irish Catholic family; her older sister Mary Margaret became a singer and actress, and her brother Marcus also performed with The Second City. In 1974, the year she finished at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute, she joined the troupe’s Toronto company as an understudy, at one point covering for Gilda Radner until Radner left for New York. Her break came on tour in Chicago, replacing an ailing lead, and by 1976 she was the company’s resident leading woman.

Second City Television, launched by the troupe that same year, gave her a decade of characters and the authority of a writer. She played the singer Lola Heatherton, did Elizabeth Taylor, worked alongside John Candy, Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin, and in 1982 shared the Primetime Emmy for writing on the show’s NBC version, SCTV Network 90.

Hollywood used her in pieces. Martin Scorsese cast her as Gail, the ice-cream truck driver who leads a vigilante mob through SoHo in After Hours, and Tim Burton made her Delia Deetz, the self-serious sculptor of Beetlejuice. She met the production designer Bo Welch on that set; they married in 1992 and had two sons. Then came Home Alone and its sequel, the largest audiences of her life, for a part she played almost entirely straight. Her voice travelled further still: she spoke and sang as Sally, the stitched-together rag doll of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Here is the oddity in the record. Her most-watched performance is her least characteristic, and the films that showed what she could actually do, Christopher Guest’s largely improvised mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration, played to modest crowds. The last of them is a satire about a veteran actress who hears that her small film is drawing awards talk. O’Hara’s turn won the National Board of Review’s supporting actress prize, and the Academy never nominated her, for that role or any other. The industry that kept hiring her rarely knew where to put her, and for long stretches it put her in the mother’s chair.

Schitt’s Creek changed the scale. Dan Levy and his father, her old SCTV partner Eugene Levy, created the CBC sitcom about a rich family stranded in a town they once bought as a joke, and O’Hara arrived at the first meetings with Moira already half-designed: the black-and-white armour of a wardrobe, the rotating wigs chosen to match the character’s mood. She described the accent as a souvenir of Moira’s travels and kept adding words like “frippet” and “pettifogging” to the scripts. The show began quietly on Canadian television and found a far larger audience on streaming. Its sixth and final season won all seven major comedy categories at the 2020 Emmys, hers included, and O’Hara added the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award for the same role, on top of six Canadian Screen Awards over the show’s run.

The last stretch was the busiest. She returned as Delia in Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in 2024 and voiced the opossum Pinktail in The Wild Robot. In 2025 she appeared in two very different series at once: as Patty Leigh, the ousted studio chief whose job goes to Seth Rogen‘s character in Apple TV+‘s The Studio, and as Gail, a therapist with her own grief, in the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us. Both performances earned Emmy nominations. She won neither.

She died on January 30, 2026, at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, aged 71, after emergency services were called to her home in Brentwood; the cause was later given as a pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer as the underlying condition. In March she won the Actor Award for female actor in a comedy series for The Studio, the first woman to take an individual trophy from the Screen Actors Guild posthumously. Rogen accepted it and said she “showed that you could be a genius and you could be kind.” At the Emmys in September, Macaulay Culkin, her son in Home Alone, joined Annie Murphy and Dan Levy, her children in Schitt’s Creek, to pay tribute.

She held Canadian and American citizenship and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2017. The Studio continues without her, and Rogen has said its new season acknowledges that the show is now “a little anchorless.” The phrase fits every ensemble she belonged to. Her career argued that the supporting player can be the author of a scene, and Moira Rose, arriving after four decades of proof, is the version audiences finally saw at full size.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, Beetlejuice, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Schitt's Creek, Christopher Guest, Best in Show

Related People

Catherine Keener

Rooney Mara

Kate O'Flynn

Kate Hudson

Kate McKinnon

Rosie O'Donnell