Born 72 years ago this week (March 4) in Toronto, Canada, Catherine O'Hara is perhaps best known for her role as Kate McCallister in Home Alone (1990), one of the highest-grossing comedies and holiday films of all time.
“I love you… I’ll see you later,” said Macaulay Culkin, who famously played her son Kevin in the film and its sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, upon hearing of O’Hara’s death.
Her innate talent was seasoned from the start by her parents Marcus Charles O’Hara and Margarat Ann (née Meehan), who were “devout Catholic, but never forgetting that the greatest gift is a sense of humor,” O’Hara told Julia Louis-Dreyfus (“Wiser than Me,” October 30, 2024). That they gave their seven children each other was, O’Hara said, a real treasure. That and the ability to see the funny side of life, which led her eldest brother Marcus, Jr., to bring home his friend from the theatre, Gilda Radner.
Gilda was such an important force in Catherine’s life — “just one beautiful person,” “lovely and talented and hilarious” — in person and on stage.
Not unlike O’Hara herself.
“She had my parents improvising … and doing … some improv games …” and “let all of us see that … regular people … could actually be in show business and have a job…,” she told Today’s Willie Geist.
O’Hara had begun gravitating toward comedy as a career after she watched Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, especially when she made her father laugh by impersonating them, she told the New Yorker in 2019 — something her mother was good at as well, her father the consummate story-teller.
Fresh out of high school, O’Hara skipped college and followed Radner to Second City, where, she initially waitressed, being told after auditioning to “keep her day job.” But, by 1974, having carefully studied Radner’s every move and expression, she joined the troupe when Radner left for bigger things, and was a breakout success, even writing a hit for SCTV she helped found. That it was pre-internet, she told Louis-Dreyfus, let her be “blindly optimistic” — free of online strangers throwing figurative darts at her.
“Second City University of Comedy,” as she dubbed it, gave her just the launch she needed. But, by 1982, pushing 30, she craved not so much stardom as marriage and family. As she told Louis-Dreyfus, “I was raised to think you get married and you have children, if God willing, that’s your life.” So, though it was very emotional, she gave her notice.
She found both love and success with Beetlejuice (1988), her breakout role as Delia Deetz spotlighting her zany, eccentric style and making her a star. Enter stage left, her future husband, Bo Welch, the film’s production designer, who had a crush on her. He kept showing up, talking with her. What gives, she asked the director, Tim Burton? He knew and arranged for a date after filming wrapped and before long Catherine was moving to LA for love.
“My husband and I laugh about everything all day long,” she told People in 1992. “That’s the best. Or if we get into a fight, we’ll actually make fun of each other to break the tension. It really helps,” she said. “My parents were blessed — they laughed until the end.”
"That’s the best way to live,” she added, “because there’s so much sadness. You’re really lucky if your sense of humor is encouraged, because I think we’re all born with it, and if it’s encouraged in your life, that’s a gift.”
Ironically, Louis-Dreyfus and O’Hara both had visits-to-the-Vatican stories — O’Hara about a unique tour, a wedding gift from Burton, that included Pope St. John Paul II’s closet (!); and Louis-Dreyfus, invited when Pope Francis wanted to address the spiritual “importance of laughter and comedy.”
O’Hara expressed gratitude that she was still married, and admitted candidly, as did Louis-Dreyfus, that, anyone who is honest will admit that staying married is not always easy.
With humor — a sign of intelligence, which is often what it takes to stay married — they toughed out the hard times.
But then she had learned from two pros that laughter is an essential glue holding marriage together and that, in fact, “Making each other laugh is a very sexy thing.”
Asked a year before her untimely death what role she would most like to be remembered for, poignantly, she said that of wife and mother.
Fittingly, she was buried after a service at St. Martin of Tours in Los Angeles on Valentine’s Day.
