This Catherine O’Hara tribute is for the performer so many of us felt we grew up with. She died on January 30, 2026 in Los Angeles at 71 after a brief illness, and the public grief made clear how deeply she was loved. Tributes arrived from collaborators and fans across generations.
What She Gave Us Onscreen
She built characters with precision and mischief. As Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, she turned vowels into music and made reinvention feel possible, earning an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and SAG honors in 2020. Before that, she became holiday ritual as Kate McCallister in Home Alone, and she sparred and sashayed as Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice. I am watching that dinner scene while I type and it still snaps like a live wire.
Comedy is a team sport, and she was the partner you wanted when a scene tilted. With Christopher Guest, dialogue grew from detailed outlines, which is why Cookie Fleck in Best in Show and her turns in Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind feel so alive. She listened, pivoted, and heightened without cruelty, the controlled improv that Guest and Eugene Levy cultivated for years.
Schitt’s Creek was scripted, yet she constructed so much of Moira herself. The wigs, the couture, the wonderfully odd diction. She drew on improv roots to shape behavior, timing, and word choice. She talked about improvising from an honest place, which is why Moira never felt like a sketch. She felt human.
The Tim Burton Voice That Haunts and Heals
With director Tim Burton, O’Hara didn’t just play oddballs. She lent her voice to the uncanny and the tender. In The Nightmare Before Christmas, she voiced Sally and Shock, giving melancholy some backbone. In Frankenweenie, she snapped between characters with that elastic, unmistakable tone. And yes, there is still that dinner scene chant families love to echo every October: “daylight come, and we wanna go home.”
Home Alone, Macaulay, and the Tender Art of Running Back
Every December, families still quote the airport sprint and the reunion under twinkle lights. Her trust with Macaulay Culkin made those moments land. Decades later, she honored him at the Hollywood Walk of Fame and joked she was his “fake mom who left you home alone not once but twice.” After she died, his note began, “Mama. I thought we had time.” It read like a final hand squeeze from a screen family that became a real one.
The Last of Us, The Studio, and Late-Career Nerve
She surprised new audiences as Gail, a therapist in Jackson, in The Last of Us season 2, and as Patty Leigh on Apple TV+’s The Studio. The projects underscored what longtime fans already knew: she could move from absurdity to ache and make the stakes feel human.
The Comic Scream, Perfectly Tuned
O’Hara treated the scream like an instrument. In Beetlejuice, her octave-vaulting yelps punctuate the chaos; in Schitt’s Creek, Moira’s theatrical shrieks arrive right on cue; and in Home Alone, she turns “Kevin!” into a full-body alarm you can still hear in your bones. It is craft, not noise, and it never punches down. (Rewatch any of those moments and you’ll hear the control inside the volume.)
What She Gave Us Offscreen
Kindness was part of her craft. Colleagues remembered the steadiness that made sets feel safe, from the Second City roots with Eugene and Dan Levy to those ensemble laboratories with Christopher Guest. She met Bo Welch on Beetlejuice and built a life that colleagues called generous and grounded.
Her giving was concrete. In 2020, she played “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” for Upward Bound House and won $250,000, which looks like groceries, rent, and steadier bedtimes for real families. She also amplified the Terry Fox Foundation and showed up for the UHN Foundation UHNITED campaign, using her microphone to pass the mic.
What Endures
We did not know her personally, but we felt as if we had grown up with her voice. If we carry anything forward, let it be the way she made space for partners to shine and turned generosity into a habit. That rhythm is worth practicing.
