Canadian-born Hollywood star, Catherine O’Hara, who rose to fame with immensely popular roles in films and sitcoms such as ‘Home Alone’ and ‘Schitt’s Creek’, died on Friday at the age of 71.
According to a statement from her agency, Creative Artists Agency, O’Hara died at her home in Los Angeles “following a brief illness”. No other details were immediately available.
Friends of the star and celebrities took to the social media to express their shock and grief at the gifted actor’s death. The ‘Home Alone’ series’ protagonist, Macaulay Culkin, whose mother she played in the films, said in a post on Instagram: “Mama, I thought we had time,” alongside an image from the film and a recent recreation from the same pose. “I wanted more. I wanted to sit in a chair next to you. I heard you. But I had so much more to say. I love you,” he added.
Meryl Streep, who worked with O’Hara in ‘Heartburn’, said in a statement that she “brought love and light to our world, through whipsmart compassion for the collection of eccentrics she portrayed.”
Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, O’Hara was the sixth of seven children in a Catholic family of Irish descent. She graduated from Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute, an alternative high school and later joined Second City in her early 20s, as an understudy to Gilda Radner before Radner left for ‘Saturday Night Live’.
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Her career was launched at the Second City in Toronto in the in 1970s, when she first worked with Eugene Levy, who would become a lifelong collaborator and her ‘Schitt’s Creek’ cos-tar. The ‘Second City Television’ series, which began on Canadian TV in the 1970s and aired on NBC in the US in the early ’80s, spawned a legendary group of esoteric comedians including Martin Short, John Candy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis and Joe Flaherty.
‘Schitt’s Creek’ was undoubtedly one of the pinnacles of O’Hara’s success, the perfect personification of her comic talents. The small show created by Levy and his son, Dan, about a wealthy family forced to live in a tiny town would dominate the Emmys in its sixth and final season.
While O’Hara played oddball supporting characters in Martin Scorsese’s 1985 ‘After Hours’ and Tim Burton’s 1988 ‘Beetlejuice’, films like the Home Alone catapulted her to fame, in which she played a horrified mother who accidentally abandons her child. The films were among the biggest box office earners of the early 1990s and their Christmas setting made them TV perennials.
“I am devastated,” Christopher Guest said in a statement, adding, “We have lost one of the comic giants of our age.” O’Hara and Guest worked in a series of mockumentaries that began with the 1996 ‘Waiting for Guffman’ and continued with 2000’s ‘Best in Show’, 2003’s ‘A Mighty Wind’ and 2006’s ‘For Your Consideration’. ‘Best in Show’ was the biggest hit and best remembered film of the series.
“Oh, genius to be near you,” said Pedro Pascal on Instagram, remembering O’Hara, with whom he worked in HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’. “Eternally grateful. There is less light in my world,” he said.
O’Hara 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.
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