Actress and comedian Catherine O’Hara died on Friday at 71, according to TMZ. She was best known for her roles in Home Alone and Beetlejuice, as well as for her several collaborations with Christopher Guest, including Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.
She won numerous awards for her role as Moira Rose on the sitcom Schitt’s Creek. And just this past year, she starred opposite Seth Rogen on Apple TV’s The Studio.
No cause of death has been reported, but her representatives at CAA confirmed that she suffered from a “brief illness.”
O’Hara, born and raised in Toronto, Canada, got her start in 1974 at the Second City improv theater as an understudy for Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner. She eventually joined the main company there and became a fixture of the group’s SCTV sketch series alongside fellow comedy legends like Martin Short, John Candy, Andrea Martin, and Eugene Levy, who became a lifelong comedy partner.
She was famously cast on the sixth season of SNL in 1981, but quit after just one week before ever appearing on screen. “I got asked to be on Saturday Night Live. And of course I said yes. Who doesn’t want to do that?” she explained in a 2024 interview. But when SCTV got picked up for another season, she said, “Oh, sorry, I gotta go be with my family,” meaning her comedy cohort.
The actress gained mainstream notoriety in the U.S. when she took on leading roles in Hollywood blockbusters Beetlejuice in 1988 and then Home Alone in 1990, playing the mother who leaves Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister behind and spends the rest of the film trying to get back to him.
Starting with Waiting for Guffman in 1996, she formed a long-term creative relationship with director Christopher Guest, appearing in several of his beloved improvised films. O’Hara memorably played Cookie Fleck in 2000’s Best in Show, and Mickey Crabbe in 2003’s A Mighty Wind, both opposite Levy.
O’Hara and Levy then reunited in 2015 for the award-winning Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, in which they played a formerly wealthy couple who have to start over after losing everything. The role of Moira Rose won O’Hara her first acting Emmy Award, as well as a Golden Globe.
Just this past year, O’Hara received two Emmy nominations for her work in The Studio, in which she played a thinly veiled version of former Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal, and HBO’s The Last of Us, where she played the post-apocalyptic therapist to Pedro Pascal’s Joel.
“Oh, genius to be near you,” Pascal posted on Instagram Friday. “Eternally grateful. There is less light in my world, this lucky world that had you, will keep you, always.
While she was not known to be ill, O’Hara did appear more gaunt than usual in her last major public appearance at the Emmy Awards in September of this past year.
O’Hara leaves behind husband, Bo Welch, a production designer whom she met on the set of Beetlejuice, and two sons, Matthew, 31, and Luke, 28.
