Catherine O'Hara

O'Hara married production designer and director Bo Welch in 1992 after meeting him on the set of Beetlejuice. They had two sons, Matthew and Luke. O'Hara was also the sister of musician and actress Mary Margaret O'Hara, and she had dual Canadian and American citizenship.

O'Hara had dextrocardia with situs inversus, a rare congenital condition in which the heart and other major organs were arranged as a mirror image of their usual positions. She contracted COVID-19 while filming The Studio.

O'Hara died on January 30, 2026, after a brief illness. Her cause of death was a pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer identified as the underlying cause.

O'Hara began her comedy career with The Second City in Toronto in 1974. She initially worked as an understudy and served as an understudy for Gilda Radner before joining the touring company. She became Second City's resident leading female comic by 1976.

When Second City created the sketch comedy series Second City Television in 1976, O'Hara became one of its regular performers and writers. She created characters including the show-business has-been Lola Heatherton and impersonated figures such as Lucille Ball, Tammy Faye Bakker, Gilda Radner, Katharine Hepburn, and Brooke Shields. Her writing on the programme earned her a Primetime Emmy Award in 1982, along with three additional nominations.

O'Hara was briefly hired for Saturday Night Live during its 1981 restructuring, but she left before appearing on air and returned to SCTV. She later made guest appearances on the programme through its 1984 conclusion.

O'Hara made her feature-film debut in Double Negative, which also starred her SCTV castmates John Candy, Eugene Levy, and Joe Flaherty. She gained wider recognition as Delia Deetz in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988), followed by her role as Kate McCallister in Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992).

Her other notable film work included After Hours, Heartburn, Dick Tracy, The Paper, Wyatt Earp, Penelope, and Frankenweenie. She also provided voices for animated films including The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicken Little, Over the Hedge, Monster House, Where the Wild Things Are, Frankenweenie, Elemental, and The Wild Robot.

O'Hara frequently collaborated with director and writer Christopher Guest in the mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. She appeared opposite Eugene Levy in these films, playing a dog trainer with him in Best in Show and a folk-singing partner in A Mighty Wind.

From 2015 to 2020, O'Hara played the self-absorbed former socialite Moira Rose in the CBC sitcom Schitt's Creek. The series was created by Dan Levy and Eugene Levy, and O'Hara acted alongside Eugene Levy, with whom she had previously worked on SCTV and in Christopher Guest's films. Her performance earned six Canadian Screen Awards for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

For the sixth and final season, O'Hara won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy, the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actress in a Comedy Series, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series, and the TCA Award for Individual Achievement in Comedy.

O'Hara also appeared as Dr. Georgina Orwell in A Series of Unfortunate Events, acted in The Addams Family, Argylle, Pain Hustlers, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and voiced characters in Extinct, Elemental, and The Wild Robot. Her later television roles included Patty Leigh in The Studio and Gail Lynden in the second season of The Last of Us. She received Emmy nominations for both roles and won a posthumous Actor Award for her performance in The Studio.

O'Hara was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2017 and invested in the honour the following year. She was also named honorary mayor of Brentwood, Los Angeles, in 2021.

Her work earned two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, and numerous Canadian Screen Awards. She was the first woman to win an individual Actor Awards trophy posthumously.