Remembering Catherine O’Hara, a talented performer and a kind person

When Catherine O’Hara talked to us in 2023 about returning to the Hollywood Bowl to sing the role of Sally in “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” she surprised us by discussing just how anxious she got before showtime.

“I’m horribly nervous; I am, I am,” O’Hara said of those moments in the dark before stepping on stage.

That was hard to believe because O’Hara, who died Friday, Jan. 30 at 71, always seemed at home in the spotlight during a career in television and movies that ran almost exactly 50 years.

As Kate McCallister in “Home Alone,” it took exactly one word – “Kevin!” shouted in a panic as she realized she’d left her youngest child at home – to be remembered forever after.

For directors Tim Burton and Christopher Guest, she was a frequent collaborator in films such as Burton’s “Beetlejuice” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show.”

A decade ago, O’Hara found herself more popular than ever when she took on the role of Moira Rose, the self-absorbed, wig-wearing, very theatrical actress in the TV comedy series “Schitt’s Creek,” which won her a second Primetime Emmy more than three decades after earning her first as a writer and performer on the sketch comedy show “SCTV.”

And just a year ago, O’Hara received Emmy nominations for her work in two wildly different roles, a hilarious, bitter movie studio executive in the TV comedy “The Studio” and a grief-stricken therapist in the post-apocalyptic drama “The Last of Us.”

“I don’t think people expect you to be the same person,” she said of the disconnect viewers experienced seeing her in as Kate McCallister in “Home Alone,” Delia Deetz in “Beetlejuice,” and Moira Rose in “Schitt’s Creek.” “Because I’ve seen that online, ‘Wait a minute, she’s the mom? She’s the ‘Home Alone’ mom? Or, ‘That’s the same person?’”

Friends and fans turned to social media on Friday as news of her death spread, sharing favorite moments and memories of a woman who colleagues universally praised as a performer whose brilliant comedic chops were only matched by the kindness she shared with everyone she met.

Macaulay Culkin, who played 8-year-old Kevin in “Home Alone” and “Home Alone II,” remembered her with heartbreaking sincerity on Friday.

“Mama. I thought we had time,” Culkin wrote on Instagram next to pictures of him and O’Hara as their “Home Alone” characters and as themselves much later in life. “I wanted more. I wanted to sit in a chair next to you. I heard you. But I had so much more to say. I love you. I’ll see you later.”

Seth Rogen wrote on Instagram that her death left him without words – and can’t you picture O’Hara raising an eyebrow in disbelief that her talkative friend and fellow Canadian could really be speechless?

“I told O’Hara when I first met her I thought she was the funniest person I’d ever had the pleasure of watching on screen,” Rogen wrote. “‘Home Alone’ was the movie that made me want to make movies. Getting to work with her was a true honour.

“She was hysterical, kind, intuitive, generous,” said Rogen, who, in his role as a younger studio head, often consulted O’Hara’s Patty Leigh on “The Studio.” “She made me want to make our show good enough to be worthy of her presence in it. This is just devastating. We’re all lucky we got to live in a world with her in it.”

That she was Canadian by birth and upbringing made her death a major news story there. O’Hara eventually had dual Canadian-American citizenship.

“Over five decades of work, Catherine earned her place in the canon of Canadian comedy — from ‘SCTV’ to ‘Schitt’s Creek,’” said Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, citing two Canadian TV series, both of which provided O’Hara with her two Emmy Awards, in a statement. “Canada has lost a legend.”

Andrea Martin, her castmate on “SCTV,“ as was Eugene Levy, who played her husband on “Schitt’s Creek,” offered simple, heartfelt words of remembrance

“She is and will always be the greatest,” Martin said in a statement. “It is an honor to have called her my friend.”

Actor-director Sarah Polley, who guest-starred on “The Studio” and is also Canadian, noted her quality as a person.

“She was the kindest and the classiest,” Polley wrote on Instagram next to a photo of her, O’Hara and actor Ike Barinholtz on the set of “The Studio.” “How could she also have been the funniest person in the world? And she was at the very top of her game. There won’t be another like her.”

Though O’Hara is best remembered for her comedy roles, she imbued those parts with a humanity that often heightened the humor. She shined in the dramatic parts she took too, including an Emmy-nominated role in “Temple Grandin” as the aunt of the real-life title character, and the “Last Of Us” role that was similarly acclaimed.

“Oh, genius to be near you,” posted actor Pedro Pascal with a photo of him with O’Hara on the set of “The Last of Us.” “There is less light in my world, this lucky world that had you, will keep you, always. Always .”

“She was my Meryl Streep,” wrote actor Paul Walter Hauser on Instagram. “I could watch her in anything. Didn’t matter how good or bad the film or show was. I wanted to see what she would do.

“I am so grateful for the work she did and how she kept such a flawless reputation in a very sketchy and checkered business,” he continued. “A freaking angel just went home to Heaven. And she’s not home alone.”

O’Hara would certainly have appreciated the outpouring of love and gratitude expressed for her on Friday. But she’d have likely been a little overwhelmed by it, too.

“That amount of focus is a little frightening,” she said in 2023 about the intense focus of fans at the Hollywood Bowl. “People have their own little relationships with this character, with all the characters. And with Sally, that song is just so beautiful and tender and sweet, and sad and a little tricky to sing, as I was saying.

“I just hope when I’m out there they’re looking at the screen and seeing the original Sally instead of me,” she added.

“I sense there’s something in the wind / That feels like tragedy’s at hand,” O’Hara sang of her crush on Jack Skellington in the opening lines of “Sally’s Song.”

“And will we ever end up together? / No, I think not, it’s never to become,” she sang at its close. “For I am not the one.”

But she was the one for Jack Skellington, and she will always be the one for all of us who loved her work over the years.

We see you, Sally – and Kate and Delia and all those many characters – and we know one thing: You were always Catherine.