A LIFE OF LAUGHTER

FOLLOWING THE HOME ALONE AND SCHITT’S CREEK STAR’S SUDDEN DEATH AT 71, FRIENDS AND COSTARS REMEMBER THE COMPASSIONATE ACTRESS AND HER EFFERVESCENT TALENT

- ERIC ANDERSSON,SEAN MANDELL,GILLIAN TELLING,BRIANNE TRACY

Grateful for It All

O'Hara (in 2024 and, left, in 1986) said last year that she was "very lucky" to have had such steady work in her later years.

(1954-2026) Catherine O’Hara

Catherine O’Hara could trace her talent for embodying kooky characters—deluded former soap star Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, eccentric artist Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice, Katharine Hepburn suggestively recalling an encounter with “a lovely old stagehand” on SCTV, to name a few—to her roots in Toronto.

Her mother, Margaret Ann, a stay-at-home mom who later worked in real estate, “would always come home and imitate people she worked with,” O’Hara told People in 2024. “She was a really good character study.” As a kid O’Hara would also watch Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and other sketch shows and perform her own takes on people like Alfred Hitchcock. “I mostly did men for some reason,” she noted dryly. Her older brother Marcus dated future Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner, who gave the O’Haras a master class in performance. “She’d come over and do bits with our family. We have some ridiculous home videos of her teaching us improv games,” recalled O’Hara. “She was just so sweet and so much herself and unaffected by how talented she was.”