Catherine O’Hara, the beloved Home Alone and Schitt’s Creek star, has died following a brief illness, her manager confirmed to Yahoo on Friday. She was 71.
O’Hara, born March 4, 1954, in Toronto, Ontario, was best known for her comedic role as Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, which ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2020.
The Dan and Eugene Levy-created sitcom effectively launched O’Hara’s career back into the spotlight, where her comedic talents were widely praised. For her portrayal of the eccentric matriarch and former soap opera star, O’Hara received a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series Musical or Comedy and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
More recently, O’Hara appeared in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in 2024, where she reprised her role as narcissistic, avant-garde stepmother, Delia Deetz.
In addition to starring on the critically acclaimed Canadian sitcom and returning to her Beetlejuice beginnings, O’Hara appeared alongside a young Macaulay Culkin as Kate McCallister, mother to Kevin McCallister, in the holiday films Home Alone and Home Alone 2.
While the comedy star enjoyed a career renaissance in her 60s following the debut of Schitt’s Creek, she had decades of experience to pull from. She began her career in Canada in the mid-1970s as a writer and performer on the sketch comedy series Second City Television, which earned the 1982 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series.
She went on to appear in a slew of Christopher Guest ensemble comedy films in the ‘00s, including Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. O’Hara later appeared in the TV movie Temple Grandin in 2010, for which she received her first-ever acting nomination.
O’Hara starred in the first season of the Apple TV+ series, The Studio, on which she played Patty Leigh, a frantic high-ranking producer at the fictional production company, Continental Pictures. She earned a 2025 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on the satirical series.
O’Hara, who made her last public appearance in September 2025, received the final nomination of her career, Best Supporting Actress on Television, at this year’s Golden Globes. Her final acting role was in 2025, when she appeared in three episodes of Season 2 of The Last of Us.
Following her 70th birthday in 2024, O’Hara spoke to Elle Canada about her outlook on life and what’s to come.
“When [you turn] 70 — this is advice [I read] for anybody turning any older age —imagine that you’re going to live a minimum of another 20 years,” she told the outlet. “What are you going to do with those years? If you look at it that way, you look at it as a challenge. Like, instead of ‘Oh no, I’m going to downsize’ or ‘I’m going to slow down,’ imagine that you are going to live to 90. What are you going to do?”
O’Hara is survived by her husband, Bo Welch, and their two adult sons, Luke and Matthew, as well as her siblings, Michael, Mary Margaret, Maureen, Marcus, Tom and Patricia.
Taryn Ryder contributed reporting to this story.
