Catherine O’Hara, the Canadian actor and comedian beloved for her long career and roles in projects as varied as the Home Alone films, Beetlejuice, absurdist comedies like Best in Show, and the hit TV series Schitt’s Creek, died on Friday, her manager confirmed to Vanity Fair. She was 71 years old.
O’Hara, a Toronto native, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, and two SAG Awards throughout her career. Adored by audiences and colleagues alike, O’Hara spoke to Vanity Fair in 2025 about learning from her co-stars, singling out friend and Second City castmate Gilda Radner as a particularly important one. “I worked with really inspiring people, and I’m still trying to practice what they taught me,” O’Hara said. “I understudied her and just watched her—she was not the type to pontificate or consciously be a mentor, but she just was by example.”
Most recently, O’Hara had roles in Seth Rogen‘s Hollywood send-up The Studio and zombie thriller The Last of Us, the latter of which saw her take a dramatic turn. Though she was an industry veteran, O’Hara lightly told VF that she didn’t consider herself to be some kind of wizened mentor to less seasoned co-stars.
“Oh, not if I can help it,” she said. Instead, on set, “I think you sit around, and you tell stories, and you’ll learn a lot from stories how to and how not to, and I’d like to think that I learned from everyone of every age.”
“When you’re on a set, you’re equals, it’s just an equal playing ground,” O’Hara added. “And then, every once in a while, I’ll realize, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m a lot older than everybody. What the heck?’”
O’Hara met her husband, production designer Bo Welch, on the set of Beetlejuice in 1988. Director Tim Burton, with whom O’Hara would collaborate with several times throughout her career, had a hand in setting the pair up. In a 2024 interview with Kelly Clarkson, O’Hara reminisced about the lavish first date that the director arranged for the two: A private tour of the Vatican.
“Somebody had given it to him. It was a very inside kind of deal,” she said. “A priest took us around—he got yelled at at one point. I wish I spoke Italian, but he was definitely getting yelled at by another priest because we were in the pope’s closet, like, looking at garments and stuff. It was crazy. And this priest is just letting us open cases, and pretending to put a crown inside Bo’s backpack, taking pictures.”
Welch and O’Hara married in 1992. They had two sons, Matthew and Luke.
