Catherine O’Hara Portrayed the Vain and Delusional With a Radical Lack of Vanity

A pretentious artiste with a ghost infestation and a goth stepdaughter who hates her. A harried matriarch who discovers she’s left her youngest son home alone on Christmas. A veteran character actress who fails to conceal her thirst for an Oscar. Moira Goddamn Rose. 

These are just a few of the dozens of outsize personalities Catherine O’Hara, the comedy icon who died on Friday at 71, inhabited over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century. Her performances could be massive: histrionic, narcissistic, imperious, angry, full of passion and neurosis. These were women with enormous feelings and, almost always, no filter to mediate their expression of them. No one was better than O’Hara at playing people at the end of their ropes or legends in their own unbalanced minds. Yet her characters were also some of the most lovable—and beloved—in their respective movies and TV shows, because she never failed to imbue them with unexpected warmth, render visible the gnawing insecurities behind their rampaging egos, and throw her full, vanity-free talent into their portrayals.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Born and raised in Toronto, O’Hara got her start when Second City came to town in the mid-1970s, as part of a comedy revolution then sweeping North America. Her contemporaries included Gilda Radner, John Candy, and Eugene Levy, with whom she’d continue to work for decades. While Saturday Night Live seized the zeitgeist south of the border, O’Hara joined the cast of its Canadian counterpart, SCTV. One standout character, the hard-living showgirl Lola Heatherton, set the stage for many over-the-top O’Hara artists to come. 

Her Hollywood career took off in the ’80s. Martin Scorsese evidently picked up on her offbeat intensity, casting her as a punky ice-cream-truck driver in one of his weirdest and most fun films, After Hours. A bigger stateside breakout was her role as Delia Deetz, the stuck-up sculptor stepmother to Winona Ryder’s teenage misery chick, in Tim Burton’s 1988 comedy-horror smash Beetlejuice. Her deranged, mid-seance “Day-O” dance number is easily the best bit of physical comedy in a movie that also features a gross, shapeshifting, undead Michael Keaton. You really believe that O’Hara has lost control of her body. As obnoxious as Delia can be, she’s also kind of charming in her warped glamor. Her redemption arc in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice only works because O’Hara makes the character impossible to hate.

Home Alone and its sequel, in the early ’90s, gave her a more relatable mom character—one who simply had more stress and children in her life than any person could manage. Yet (at least for any viewer over age 10), it was Kate McCallister’s larger-than-life reaction to the family’s holiday mishap that stole the movie. The scene where she realizes Macaulay Culkin’s character is on a different continent, shrieks “KEVIN!” with her entire face contorted in horror, then faints dead away is a yuppie-mom equivalent of The Scream. The mockumentary master Christopher Guest, meanwhile, cast her in new variations of her signature artist characters: a tracksuited travel agent moonlighting in community theater in Waiting for Guffman, a folk singer with romantic baggage in A Mighty Wind, the aforementioned unlikely awards campaigner in For Your Consideration. These performances, which include plenty of great one-liners and physical gags but also unearth subtler shades of frustration and self-doubt, are some of my favorites of hers.

O’Hara never stopped working, but like many female actors once they hit 50, her profile faded a bit in the late 2000s. But then came Schitt’s Creek, in 2015, a CBC sitcom about a super-rich family that lost everything and was forced to move into a rundown motel in the backwater town they’d bought on a lark years earlier. Even with O’Hara and Levy in the lead roles, it took years to get the attention it deserved in the U.S., where it was relegated to obscure corners of the TV universe. When it finally did break through, though, it became one the signature small-screen comedies of the decade—one whose open heart and endearing performances made it possible to enjoy spending time with a clan of self-involved former billionaires. If Lola Heatherton anticipated every O’Hara artist character to come, the show’s matriarch, Moira Rose, represents their apex and culmination. That relentless self-dramatizing. That singular way of entering a room in an absurd black-and-white ensemble and shifting its entire center of gravity. That preternaturally projecting voice and strangely protean accent. (Sometimes, when I need a laugh, I watch Moira mangle the brand name “Herb Ertlinger” in a disastrous fruit wine commercial on a loop.) Schitt’s Creek swept the Emmys in 2020, earning O’Hara her only acting Emmy (she won one for writing on SCTV in 1982) and cementing her and Levy as inextricably connected elderstatespeople of Canadian comedy.

The show led to a burst of high-profile new work, in movies like the Beetlejuice sequel and Pain Hustlers as well as series including The Last of Us and The Studio. Rightfully angry women whose future depends on their ability to control how they express it, the former sci-fi dystopia’s grieving therapist character and the latter Hollywood satire’s ousted studio head call back to Kate McCallister. O’Hara was wonderful in both roles, earning a 2025 Emmy nomination for each. The news of her death is shocking, in part, because she was in the midst of a late-career renaissance. It seemed possible that we would see her continue to play some of these characters, not to mention a raft of new ones, for another generation.

O’Hara’s passing also hits hard because of who she was in life—a comedian whose down-to-earth persona could never be confused with that of her bombastic characters, and who thrived on collaboration with other funny people instead of hogging the spotlight. When I interviewed her, near the end of her Schitt’s Creek run, I was surprised to find that she was a tiny person, because characters like Moira and Delia so spectacularly filled any space they occupied. I was not surprised, having heard and read as much from multiple sources, at how thoughtful, generous, and engaged she was in conversation. When I asked about her affinity for playing self-obsessed artists, O’Hara mused: “Maybe I’m just trying to get it out of my system. I’m so afraid to be like that.” Well, she never was. But you can imagine how a deep-seated aversion to vanity could drive a person to master the art of portraying magnificent monsters.