THE ACTRESS WHO MADE
THE RIDICULOUS PROFOUND

Catherine O’Hara, who has died aged 71, could make you laugh and break your heart in the same scene. Most performers pick a lane; she moved between them without visible effort.

Born in Toronto on March 4, 1954, O’Hara was the sixth of seven children in an Irish Catholic family. After high school she waited tables at Toronto’s Second City. When she auditioned for the comedy troupe in 1974, the director told her to stick with waitressing. But when Gilda Radner left for Saturday Night Live, O’Hara — still untrained — took her place. The theatre group began a television show two years later. SCTV ran from 1976 to 1984 and turned O’Hara into a star.

On SCTV she played Lola Heatherton, a vampish talk-show host, and delivered impressions of Meryl Streep, Brooke Shields, and Lucille Ball. She also wrote for the show and won an Emmy in 1982. The work taught her how to build a character from small details — a gesture, a vocal tic, a way of holding her shoulders.

Film work came next. In Beetlejuice (1988) she played Delia Deetz, an insufferable New York sculptor. On set she met Bo Welch, the production designer. They married in 1992 and had two sons, Matthew and Luke, both now working in film production. In Home Alone (1990) O’Hara played a mother who forgets her child at Christmas and races to get back to him. The film required panic, guilt, and comedy at once. She delivered all three.

Christopher Guest cast her in four mockumentaries between 1996 and 2006. These films relied on improvisation; actors arrived with character sketches rather than finished scripts. In Best in Show (2000) O’Hara played Cookie Fleck, a dog-show contestant with a lurid past. She gave Cookie a Florida accent, a taste for animal prints, and an unshakeable cheerfulness about her former career. The performance demonstrated what O’Hara did best: taking ridiculous people seriously.

Her biggest success came late. From 2015 to 2020 she starred in Schitt’s Creek as Moira Rose, a washed-up soap actress. Moira wore absurd wigs and spoke in an accent that seemed to come from nowhere in particular. The character could have been a joke; O’Hara made her human. She won an Emmy in 2020 and a Golden Globe in 2021.

O’Hara made career decisions around her family. When her sons were young she turned down jobs that required long shoots away from home. “What’s the point of having children if I’m not going to be with them?” she told an interviewer. This meant fewer roles. It also meant she rarely appeared in anything mediocre.

She died at her Los Angeles home on January 30, 2026, after a short illness. Her last work included roles in The Last of Us and The Studio. Her husband and sons survive her.