Catherine O’Hara flipped tropes, brought humanity to every role

Like many kids growing up in the ’90s, I first encountered Catherine O’Hara as Kevin’s mom in Home Alone.

Back then, she was just that: Kevin’s (Macaulay Culkin) mom. But watching the 1990 holiday classic as an adult, as I do every single Christmas with a lovely cheese pizza just for me, you realize the brilliance she brought to the character of Kate McCallister.

Only O’Hara could elevate one line into a movie-trailer tentpole catchphrase — “Kevin!” — by delivering it in a wide-eyed, two-syllable shriek.

Her comedic genius is everywhere, from her interactions on the phone with the Chicago police — “Yeah, hi, look…” — to her banter with real-life friend John Candy, as the Polka King of the Midwest.

But O’Hara was also a great actor, and she delivered in the small moments as much as the big ones. When she’s sending Kevin upstairs and he tells her Fuller will wet the bed, and her face softens, almost imperceptibly. Or at the end, after spending days trying to get to him, she cautiously approaches her son, the mixture of love and guilt and relief all over her face, and apologizes.

O’Hara died unexpectedly last week at the age of 71. This one hit hard. She was a bona fide Canadian treasure, deeply loved by so many across generations who knew her as the art-eccentric stepmother Delia Deetz in Tim Burton’s 1988 horror comedy Beetlejuice and its 2024 sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Or as the voice of Sally, the clairvoyant escape-artist rag doll in 1993’s stop-motion marvel The Nightmare Before Christmas. (“Maybe there are two Catherine O’Haras,” I remember thinking when I noticed her name in the credits; surely this was not Kevin’s mom. But such was her range.)

Or as show-dog handler Cookie Fleck in Christopher Guest’s 2000 mockumentary Best in Show. (Not surprisingly, this year’s Westminster Dog Show paid tribute to her.)

Or any of her characters on the sketch comedy series SCTV. Or, in her final role, as movie executive Patty Leigh in the sharp AppleTV+ satire The Studio. What a career, to work for over five decades and be loved for that work until the very end.

But for me, her biggest comedic cultural contribution is Moira Rose, the eccentric matriarch at the head of the down-on-their-luck Rose family at the heart of Schitt’s Creek, a little miracle of a show created by O’Hara’s longtime collaborator and friend Eugene Levy and his son Dan that ran for six seasons on CBC and found a global audience on Netflix.

O’Hara stole every scene she was in as Moira. Her unplaceable accent best described as “rich,” her outlandish yet stylish black-and-white outfits, her absurd, art-piece wigs (her bébés), her use of slightly wrong adjectives (“I’m positively bedevilled with meetings et cetera”) — everything about Moira was larger-than-life and over-the-top and so, so funny.

But Moira also had a ton of heart.

And that’s the singular genius of O’Hara: the humanity she brought to the most wacky and cartoonish of characters. In other hands, Moira, Delia, Cookie, all of them, could have been shticky, one-dimensional caricatures, but in hers, they were fully realized. She made them real.

O’Hara played a lot of mothers, a role that is often given a short shrift. Moms get to be ice queens, sweeties, winos or nags, straight-man foils to the hilarious bumbling husband. Or they are dead.

O’Hara’s moms were flawed, eccentric, complicated and artistic — often “bad moms” by societal standards. They were full people.

She also took certain tropes and flipped them on their ear; Kate McCallister’s ongoing concern about milk (using it up, having it in the house), for example, felt like an expression of her character’s “good mom” anxiety, not a hacky “one thing about moms is, they worry about milk!” joke.

But it was as Moira, again, where she brought this sense of humanity. There is a famous scene in which she is dispensing advice to Stevie (Emily Hampshire), the acerbic hotel front-desk clerk who, in many ways, becomes part of the Rose family. Moira is upset that photos of her younger self aren’t online.

“I regret that they’re lost. They were the one perfect memorial to who I once was. And I should’ve appreciated those firm round mammae and callipygian ass while I had them,” she says, in classic Moira fashion.

Then she tells Stevie: “Take a thousand naked pictures of yourself now. You may currently think, ‘Oh, I’m too spooky.’ Or, ‘Nobody wants to see these tiny boobies.’ But believe me, one day you will look at those photos with much kinder eyes and say, ‘Dear God, I was a beautiful thing.’”

It’s a masterclass one-two punch. Her line delivery on “spooky” makes even Hampshire struggle to not break character and burst out laughing but, by the time you get to the last line, your eyes are full of tears.

Only O’Hara. Dear God, she was a beautiful thing.

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