Catherine O'Hara shares a joke with Sean Cullen (out of frame) backstage at the 2017 Canadian Screen Awards in Toronto, March 12, 2017.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
In a 2013 issue of Vanity Fair, Canada’s Catherine O’Hara took part in the magazine’s Proust Questionnaire. Asked which trait she most deplored about herself, she said it was her “gift for wasting precious time.” She also confessed to procrastination.
This was the actress who showed up two hours late to her audition for the 1988 comedy-horror film Beetlejuice. When she finally arrived, all that was waiting for her was a note from director Tim Burton: “I’m sorry. I waited as long as I could.”
She got the role of eccentric artist Delia Deetz anyway, without an audition. She reprised the role in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, released in 2024. It had been 36 years, but some things are worth the wait.
It was one of her final roles.
From Schitt's Creek to Home Alone, here are five of Catherine O'Hara's greatest performances
Ms. O’Hara, a consummate comedic actress who began as a Second City troupe member in Toronto and memorably played an absent-minded mom to Macaulay Culkin in a pair of Home Alone movies, died at age 71 at her home in Los Angeles, after a brief illness.
“Of course she was a brilliant performer,” Second City chief executive officer Ed Wells said in a statement. “But she was also a wonderful human who gave back to the community. Catherine was one of the first alumni to serve on Second City’s Artistic Advisory Board, giving us and the next generation of comedians the gift of her time, talent and mentorship.”
Ms. O’Hara was honoured with the Order of Canada in 2017 and a Governor General’s Performing Arts lifetime artistic achievement award in 2021. She starred in two of Canada’s greatest television comedy exports, the sketch show SCTV (1976-84) and the CBC sitcom Schitt’s Creek (2015-20). For the latter, she won an Emmy Award in 2020 for her portrayal of matriarch Moira Rose, a former soap opera star consumed with her own celebrity.
Ms. O’Hara told the Associated Press she pictured Moira as someone who had married rich and wanted to remind everyone that she was special, too. To perfect Moira’s voice and Mid-Atlantic accent, Ms. O’Hara pored through old vocabulary books, “Moira-izing,” she said, the dialogue even further than what was already written.
Yuk Yuk’s comedy club impresario Mark Breslin said: “She was one of the few comedy performers who improved the material just by showing up.
“Her later work was equal to her earlier work, which is very rare.”
Ms. O’Hara excelled among a crew of improvisors brought together by director Christopher Guest for a series of mockumentaries that began with 1996’s Waiting for Guffman and continued with 2000’s Best in Show, 2003’s A Mighty Wind and 2006’s For Your Consideration.
Comedy biographer Paul Myers said she drew on improv skills she honed at Second City in Toronto.
”I’m constantly hearing from many generations of female comedians who were particularly inspired by Catherine.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney offered his condolences in a statement and said Ms. O’Hara captivated audiences on stages and screens for more than five decades.
“Though her talents are recognised worldwide, Canadians will always claim her as one of our own,” he said.
One of the actors she worked with in the mockumentaries was Eugene Levy, her husband in Schitt’s Creek and among the illustrious SCTV alumni that include Robin Duke, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Harold Ramis, Martin Short, Dave Thomas and John Candy.
In 1985, she was one of the comedians who lent their voice to the Canadian charity single Tears Are Not Enough. Musicians such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Geddy Lee and Bryan Adams, under the name Northern Lights, headlined the effort to raise money and awareness for Ethiopian famine relief.
In 2025, she starred in the first season of the Apple TV comedy series The Studio. The actress found that co-directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg weren’t precious about their scripts, and even welcomed her rewrites of scenes.
“It’s the only way I know how to work,” Ms. O’Hara told The Globe and Mail. “And it’s so lovely to get to work with people who actually collaborate and want to hear your ideas.”
Mr. Rogen said Ms. O’Hara “would rewrite the scenes and make them 1,000 times better.”
Of her many characters and impersonations on SCTV, Ms. O’Hara’s hard-laughing Las Vegas chanteuse Lola Heatherton was particularly memorable, with her dramatic singing style and over-the-top compliment, “I wanna bear your children!”
In a 1983 Globe story, writer Bill MacVicar praised Ms. O’Hara as a “superb mimic” whose impression of actress Katharine Hepburn in particular was a “flawless homage to a veteran eccentric.”
Ms. O’Hara was born on March 4, 1954, in Toronto. She was the sixth of seven children in a family that included older sister Mary Margaret O’Hara, a singer-actress known for her acclaimed 1988 album, Miss America.
She attended Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke, Ont., sitting alongside future Second City, SCTV, SNL and Schitt’s Creek cast member Ms. Duke in her Grade 9 homeroom.
“All of a sudden there was someone like me, who laughed at the same things,” Ms. Duke told The Globe in 2023. “We’d sit at the back of class, and Catherine would be doing impressions of Paul Lynde, James Mason and Moms Mabley.”
She was promoted from waitress to cast member at the Toronto branch of Second City. The cast went on to create SCTV. On that series, she impersonated Lucille Ball, Brooke Shields, Jane Fonda, Tammy Faye Bakker and Elizabeth Taylor.
In the early 1980s, Ms. O’Hara was recruited to join SNL in New York. In the book Live From New York, NBC programming executive Dick Ebersol said he had hired her, but that show creator Lorne Michaels “scared her right off the show” with his negative energy, at a time when the series was struggling. “She packed up her stuff and went home to Canada that night.”
About her home country, Ms. O’Hara told Rolling Stone magazine that Canadians didn’t have the same sense of nationalism that she witnessed in the United States.
“And that’s a good thing because it does make you look outside of yourself and be aware of the world and not take yourself seriously,” she said. “And I think Canadians have not only a sense of humour about others but also about themselves.”
In 1992, Ms. O’Hara married American production designer and art director Bo Welch at Our Lady of Malibu Church, sometimes jokingly referred to as Our Lady of Perpetual Hollywood.
Though she was reluctant to return to television after SCTV, Mr. Levy and his son, Dan Levy, convinced her to play Moira on Schitt’s Creek in 2015. The six-season run resulted an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the actress.
Ms. O’Hara told The Globe’s Johanna Schneller in 2019 that of all the bad attributes a person could have, the worst would be having no sense of humour about oneself.
“It does not serve you,” she said. “Just think about this: We are all going to die, and yet we carry on. We have no power at all, and we’re in denial. Taking ourselves seriously seems so ridiculous in the face of that fact.”
She is survived by her husband, Bo Welch; sons Matthew and Luke; and siblings Michael O’Hara, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Maureen Jolley, Marcus O‘Hara, Tom O’Hara and Patricia Wallice.
With files from the Associated Press