A stepmother plagued by ghosts and a goth stepdaughter who despises her. A mother who realizes she has accidentally left her youngest child behind for Christmas. An actress unable to hide her Oscar ambitions. Moira Goddamn Rose. 

These represent just a handful of the many larger-than-life personas inhabited by Catherine O’Hara, the comedy legend who passed away on Friday at age 71, over a career lasting more than fifty years. Her performances were often grand: melodramatic, self-absorbed, domineering, furious, brimming with passion and anxiety. She portrayed women with immense emotions and, nearly without exception, no restraint in expressing them. No one surpassed O’Hara at depicting individuals pushed to their limit or living as legends in their own disturbed imaginations. Yet her characters also rank among the most endearing and adored in film and television, because she consistently infused them with surprising humanity, revealed the nagging vulnerabilities behind their towering egos, and committed her complete, ego-free skill to every role.

A Toronto native, O’Hara began her career with the arrival of Second City in the mid-1970s, during a comedy wave moving across North America. Her peers included Eugene Levy, John Candy, and Rick Moranis, collaborators for decades to come. While Saturday Night Live captured the cultural moment in the United States, O’Hara became part of the cast of its Canadian sister show, SCTV. A memorable character, the decadent showgirl Lola Heatherton, paved the way for the many extravagant artist roles O’Hara would later master. 

Her Hollywood breakthrough occurred in the 1980s. Martin Scorsese recognized her unique energy, casting her as a quirky ice-cream truck driver in his peculiar and entertaining film After Hours. An even more significant U.S. success was her part as Delia Deetz, the pretentious sculptor stepmother to Winona Ryder’s sullen teen, in Tim Burton’s 1988 hit Beetlejuice. Her possessed dinner scene stands as the film’s finest piece of physical comedy, even alongside a grotesque, transforming undead Michael Keaton. The performance convinces you that O’Hara’s body is truly overtaken. While Delia can be irritating, she also possesses a twisted charm. Her character’s redemption in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice succeeds solely because O’Hara makes her impossible to despise.

Home Alone and its sequel in the early 1990s provided her with a more down-to-earth mother role—one simply overwhelmed by stress and children. Yet for viewers above a certain age, it was Kate McCallister’s exaggerated reaction to the family’s holiday disaster that became iconic. The moment she comprehends that Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin is on another continent, screams his name with her face twisted in terror, and then collapses is a yuppie mother’s version of The Scream. Mockumentary auteur Christopher Guest, meanwhile, cast her in fresh iterations of her classic artist types: a tracksuit-wearing travel agent dabbling in amateur theater in Waiting for Guffman, a folk singer with romantic troubles in A Mighty Wind, and the previously mentioned desperate awards contender in For Your Consideration. These roles, filled with sharp dialogue and physical humor while also exposing deeper layers of frustration and insecurity, rank among her most exceptional work.

O’Hara remained consistently active, but like numerous actresses after 50, her visibility diminished somewhat in the late 2000s. That changed with Schitt’s Creek in 2015, a CBC sitcom about an ultra-wealthy family who loses its fortune and must relocate to a dilapidated motel in a remote town they once purchased as a joke. Despite starring O’Hara and Levy, the show took years to gain its due recognition in the United States, initially confined to niche programming. Upon finally breaking through, it became one of the defining comedies of the decade—its warmth and charming performances made a family of self-absorbed ex-billionaires delightful to watch. If Lola Heatherton foreshadowed O’Hara’s future artist roles, the show’s matriarch, Moira Rose, is their ultimate expression. The constant self-mythologizing. The unique ability to enter a room in a ridiculous black-and-white outfit and command its entire energy. The extraordinarily projecting voice and ever-shifting accent. (Sometimes, for a quick laugh, I replay Moira butchering the name “Herb Ertlinger” in a wine commercial on loop.) Schitt’s Creek dominated the 2020 Emmys, winning O’Hara her sole acting Emmy (she had won one for writing on SCTV in 1982) and solidifying her and Levy’s status as inseparable pillars of Canadian comedy.

The series sparked a surge of prominent new projects, including films like the Beetlejuice sequel and The Last of Us Part II, plus series such as The Last of Us and The Morning Show. Portraying justifiably furious women whose futures hinge on controlling that anger, the grieving therapist in the former sci-fi dystopia and the deposed studio head in the latter Hollywood satire echo Kate McCallister’s spirit. O’Hara excelled in both parts, receiving a 2025 Emmy nomination for each. Her death is startling, partly because she was experiencing a late-career resurgence. It appeared likely she would continue to play these and many new characters for years to come.

O’Hara’s death is also profoundly felt because of the person she was off-screen—a comedian whose grounded nature stood in stark contrast to her flamboyant characters, and who flourished through collaboration rather than seeking solo acclaim. When I interviewed her near the conclusion of Schitt’s Creek, I was taken aback by her small physical stature, as figures like Moira and Delia so commandingly occupied their spaces. I was not surprised, based on widespread accounts, by her considerate, generous, and fully present demeanor in conversation. When questioned about her knack for playing self-centered artists, O’Hara reflected: “Maybe I’m just trying to get it out of my system. I’m so afraid to be like that.” She certainly never was. Yet one can see how a profound personal rejection of vanity could fuel the mastery of playing such glorious, monstrous creations.