- - Dear Catherine O'Hara—A Tribute to the Legendary Actress

Fiorella ValdesoloJanuary 30, 2026 at 10:28 PM

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Dear Catherine OR The Bebé Was No Balatron Getty Images

In 1994, Catherine O’Hara gave the eulogy at John Candy’s funeral. She started with this: Who am I to be standing up here and talking about John Candy? I’m just one of the millions of people whose lives were touched and enriched by the life that was John Candy. She was there that day because twenty years earlier Candy had been the one who invited her to be part of Second City in her native Toronto. An improv troupe that birthed fellow comic royalty like Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, Rick Moranis, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner (she started as her understudy), many of whom would go on, like O’Hara, to star in SCTV, the Canadian sketch comedy show that aired from 1976 until 1984. There, O’Hara was given free rein to create and bring to life the characters and impersonations sprung from her imagination, the more crackpot the better. “When in doubt, play insane,” O’Hara told The New Yorker in a 2019 interview. On SCTV, she did just that, with aplomb, often helped along by a considerable amount of wigs. She was a dizzy teenage Brooke Shields (brown, bouncy, hot-rollered) with Moranis as her mom Teri; a no-nonsense Katharine Hepburn (grey, chignon) telling us about her first time with that iconic husky, rapidfire voice and crisp white shirt, the collar popped; and characters of her own making like the perpetually tipsy lounge singer Lola Heatherton (platinum blonde, bouffant) and the raunchy Dusty Towne (strawberry blonde, beehive), whose hot Holiday Special was recently delivered to the eyes of a new generation when it made the rounds on social media.

For the generation who came of age in the eighties and nineties, O’Hara’s turn as Delia Deetz in 1988’s Beetlejuice (the sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was released in 2024) looms large. The narcissistic stepmother to Winona Ryder’s perpetually gloomy Lydia, O’Hara was in a supporting role, but her intensity and razor-sharp comic timing as the 1980s tortured artist stole the show. As did her wardrobe of black, white and red Issey Miyake, Comme des Garcons, and Yohji Yamamoto, a visual expression of her character’s eccentricities that was all sourced in an afternoon of shopping at L.A.’s Maxfield by costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers (she is also responsible for making the iconic black glove fascinator).

Her wardrobe as Moira Rose, the onetime soap opera star who is forced to decamp to the titular Schitt’s Creek with her husband and adult children after losing their fortune, leaned into similar eccentricities. O’Hara’s self-described fashion armor as Moira was monochromatic, couture (Givenchy and McQueen made repeat appearances), heavy on the statement brooches, and inspired by the wardrobe of Daphne Guiness. Much like on SCTV, wigs figure prominently in Moira’s wardrobe, agents of transformation once again. To quickly understand O’Hara’s comic genius, one need only watch the scene of her filming a commercial for Herb Ertlinger, the “unpretentious winery that pampers its fruit like its own babies.” Moira who has clearly been dipping into the dazzling peach cow-bat-pl Riesling Rioja is garbling words between sips but never, as any good soap opera star would do, losing confidence or breaking character. “You’ll remember the name, Herb Irlinger, Bert Hirngive, Irv Herlinger, Bing Livehanger,” she says, sloshed. Moira’s accent, which could be described as haughty global fusion, was her signature; as was her theatrical delivery of words rarely used in spoken English. Confabulate. Frippet. Pettifogging. Bombilating. Prestidigitator. Bedeviled. There’s a corner of Reddit devoted, rightfully so, to the assemblage of such Moira-isms.

No one could have landed the delivery of them quite like O’Hara. Her humor has always been the perceptive kind: her characters have a human quality because she has built them from decades of keen observation, compiling people’s idiosyncrasies and affectations and twitches like a cultural archeologist. Waiting until the day—or rather, the character—through which she can release her findings. Like Lucille Ball (who she also impersonated on SCTV) and Carol Burnett, she was an encyclopedia of people, but also a hilarious musical performer—her Christopher Guest characters had many, perhaps none more memorable than “Midnight at the Oasis” with the late great Fred Willard in Waiting for Guffman—and a master of slapstick and physical comedy. Please recall for a moment O’Hara as Best in Show’s Cookie Fleck (alongside her frequent collaborator Eugene Levy as Gerry with the two left feet), who gave the world a trip and a subsequent limp that will go down in comedy movie history.

The decades of my own life could be measured in O’Hara movies. Beetlejuice, a date with my junior high boyfriend at the movie theater in Lawrence, Massachusetts; the SCTV years unearthed along with Kids in the Hall in high school, watched obsessively between bong hits in friend’s musty basements; Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries sidelined my college years and early twenties; and After Hours, the 1985 Martin Scorsese gem where she played an eccentric (naturally) Mister Softee vendor, a discovery in my twenties, having moved to New York and eager to comb through its various appearances on screen.

The O’Hara that I have spent the most time with in the past few years, thanks to being the parent of a seven-year-old, is the version that the entire world spends time with every December: Kate McCallister in Home Alone. A movie that hits different when you are now closer to O’Hara’s age than to Macaulay Culkin’s, when suddenly all her little imperfections and mistakes become infinitely more relatable. She was Kevin’s mom, but in a way, she was all our moms too, so familiar were we after this many repeat viewings with her twitches and affectations and idiosyncrasies. What I didn’t realize until writing this remembrance is that O’Hara (or her voice at least) played another recent oft-quoted mother: Pinktail, the practical possum in The Wild Robot whose wisdom became instantly meme-able. “I do not have the programming to be a mother,” says Roz, before Pinktail reassures them, “No one does. We just make it up.”

O’Hara was more interested, as she once said in an interview, in truth than in likability. That was apparent both in her comedic choices, and her personal ones. Unlike many of her Hollywood peers she was as wary of needles and surgery as she was unafraid of aging and the visible traces of it. In the words of Moira Rose, juvenescence was not something she had any interest in chasing. After all, this was a woman of a thousand faces. And comedy? It was clearly always a salve for O’Hara. Humor is how people survive things, she once said. Something that rings true now more than ever.

When I heard the news about O’Hara’s sudden death today and found myself thinking about her life for this piece, my mind wandered back to that eulogy she gave to her beloved costar and friend on the occasion of his own untimely passing more than 30 years ago. Who am I to be here and talking about Catherine O’Hara? I’m just one of the millions of people whose lives were touched and enriched by the life that was Catherine O’Hara.

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