Remembering Catherine O’Hara: ‘On the Mount Rushmore of Comic Actors’
Richard Rushfield, Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen on her once-in-a-generation instinct, intelligence and utter originality
“This was a real gut punch because she is the Mount Rushmore of comic actors in our time,” says Richard Rushfield of Catherine O’Hara, who died Friday at the age of 71. “She just took such an unexpected turn in the way she envisioned every single character she played and every sketch.”
From her genre-defining breakout on the Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV, O’Hara accumulated countless credits across film and television, including roles for Martin Scorsese (After Hours), Mike Nichols (Heartburn), Warren Beatty (Dick Tracy), Alan Alda (Betsy’s Wedding) and Tim Burton (Beetlejuice and its 2024 sequel). She was a 10-time Emmy nominee, winning her first award for SCTV as a writer in 1982 and later a second for Schitt’s Creek. Last year, she was a double nominee for her supporting performance in Seth Rogen’s comedy The Studio and for her guest appearance on HBO’s hit The Last of Us. O’Hara’s ubiquity is part of the reason she was so beloved, says Christopher Rosen.
“Beetlejuice, Home Alone and The Nightmare Before Christmas, where she has a voice role, are movies people watch all the time,” Chris says. “So while she wasn’t the most famous person ever, she was someone who was constantly in our lives.”
Born in Canada, O’Hara got her start on SCTV, the sketch comedy series that also launched the careers of several future stars, including Eugene Levy and John Candy. She worked with them both numerous times, including opposite Levy on Schitt’s Creek and Candy in Home Alone.
“I was reading an interview she did in New York in 2019, kind of at peak Schitt’s Creek attention,” Katey Rich says. “And she was talking about how she’d always wanted to avoid taking a role that’s just being a nice lady. And the mom in Home Alone could absolutely be just this regular, nice lady. But I don’t think that that character or movie works that well unless you have her being able to pull off the mania that develops over the course of that story… She could have had an entire career of just elevating roles like that.”