Catherine O’Hara, Forever the Belle of Absurdity

Catherine O’Hara’s death in 2026 closes the curtain on one of comedy’s most quietly radical performers, a shape-shifting character actor who turned absurdity into emotional truth—from the anarchic sketch world of SCTV to the cozy chaos of Schitt’s Creek, with stopovers in Tim Burton’s nightmares and Christopher Guest’s mockumentary circus.


Catherine O’Hara, remembered for her fearless blend of absurdity and pathos. (Image: RogerEbert.com)

Roger Ebert once framed performers like O’Hara as the kind of actors who “find the truth in the ridiculous.” His site’s tribute, “The Belle of Absurdity: Catherine O’Hara (1954–2026),” captures a career that never chased superstardom but quietly redefined what screen comedy could look like.


From Toronto Stages to Global Cult Icon

Born in 1954 in Toronto to a large Irish-Canadian family, Catherine O’Hara came up through the original Second City troupe before joining its televised offshoot, Second City Television (SCTV), in the 1970s. While Saturday Night Live dominated the U.S. conversation, SCTV became Canada’s alt‑channel: weirder, more character‑driven, and sneakily more cinematic.

On SCTV, O’Hara wasn’t just another sketch comedian; she was a one‑woman repertory company. Soap opera divas, washed‑up lounge singers, aggressively chipper TV hosts—she inhabited them with the detail of a method actor and the timing of an assassin.

“Brilliant, beautiful and constantly surprising, Catherine O'Hara found the truth in often absurd characters.”

That line from the Ebert.com remembrance isn’t hyperbole; it’s a good thumbnail for how O’Hara treated comedy as serious character work, long before prestige TV made that fashionable.


Catherine O’Hara at TIFF 2016, a hometown hero in Toronto’s film scene. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Finding Truth in the Ridiculous: O’Hara’s Comic Method

What separated O’Hara from a crowded field of sketch comics and sitcom moms was her willingness to go big without ever going hollow. She often played characters teetering on the edge of caricature—then fed them with such oddly specific emotional logic that they felt disturbingly plausible.

  • Hyper‑specific voice work: From Delia Deetz’s artsy aloofness in Beetlejuice to Moira Rose’s famously unplaceable accent, O’Hara used vocal tics as a narrative device, not just a gag.
  • Micro‑expressions as punchlines: A half‑second eye dart or a delayed smile often carried as much comedic weight as an entire line of dialogue.
  • Emotional stakes in absurd plots: Even in the most ridiculous scenarios—ghost‑haunted houses, dog shows, small‑town politics—her characters believed in their world completely, inviting us to do the same.
“I never think of it as ‘doing a bit.’ I think, ‘Who would actually live like this?’ Once I know that, the comedy kind of shows up on its own.”

That philosophy—treating comedy characters as people with inner lives rather than delivery systems for punchlines—turns up again and again in how collaborators describe working with her.


O’Hara’s performances often hinged less on punchlines and more on tiny, revealing reactions. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

From Beetlejuice to Best in Show: Key Film Roles

While the Ebert.com tribute foregrounds her range, it’s worth walking through a few pillars of O’Hara’s film career—projects that define not just her filmography, but late‑20th‑century screen comedy itself.

  1. Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice (1988)
    The avant‑garde stepmother from hell, Delia is both villain and victim—of her own taste level, mostly. O’Hara plays her as a performance artist trapped in a suburban horror movie, giving Tim Burton’s gothic farce a dose of yuppie satire that’s aged almost too well.
  2. Kate McCallister in Home Alone (1990) & Home Alone 2 (1992)
    Her most mainstream role turned “I left my child behind” into somehow sympathetic parenting. The now‑iconic “KEVIN!” scream is meme‑worthy, but it’s the frantic tenderness of the airport scenes that grounds the slapstick chaos.
  3. Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
    In Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s stop‑motion classic, O’Hara’s voice acting gives Sally a fragile resolve that cuts through the film’s gothic aesthetics. It’s a rare case where melancholy feels like the emotional anchor of a holiday movie.
  4. Christopher Guest Collaborations: Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), A Mighty Wind (2003)
    These improvisation‑heavy mockumentaries are where O’Hara’s skill set fully detonates. As Cookie Fleck in Best in Show, she weaponizes small‑town cheeriness and former flings into one of the funniest portraits of middle‑class insecurity ever put on film.

Ebert was a long‑time defender of Guest’s ensemble work, and O’Hara was central to that ecosystem: a performer who could spin an entire life story out of a tossed‑off improv detail.


Best in Show became a showcase for O’Hara’s improvisational brilliance alongside Eugene Levy. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Moira Rose and the Late‑Career Renaissance

When Schitt’s Creek premiered in 2015 on CBC and Pop TV, it looked like a standard “rich people go slumming” sitcom. By the time it wrapped in 2020—and swept the Emmys in a historic run—it had become a comfort‑TV juggernaut, and Catherine O’Hara’s Moira Rose was its most unlikely fashion icon.

Moira is a washed‑up soap opera star marooned in a town she once bought as a joke. She speaks like she learned English from old Hollywood newsreels and European art films, dresses exclusively in avant‑garde black and white, and treats local theater as if it were Broadway plus the Met Gala.

“We built Moira’s vocabulary from people who don’t want to be pinned down to one place. She’s not just from L.A., or Canada, or anywhere. She’s from the theater of her own mind.”

O’Hara reportedly contributed heavily to Moira’s voice and wardrobe, underlining a broader truth: at this stage of her career, she wasn’t simply taking roles; she was co‑authoring them. The series turned her into a late‑career meme machine and introduced her earlier work to Gen Z, who discovered Beetlejuice and the Guest films through streaming back channels.


O’Hara and frequent collaborator Eugene Levy discussing Schitt’s Creek at PaleyFest 2016. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Assessing the Legacy: Strengths, Blind Spots, and Cultural Impact

The Ebert.com essay frames Catherine O’Hara as a “goddess of surprise,” which is accurate but also a little neat. In reality, her legacy is a mixture of towering influence and curious under‑recognition—typical for character actors who quietly reshape genres.

What She Did Better Than Almost Anyone

  • Ensemble chemistry: From SCTV to the Guest films and Schitt’s Creek, she elevated collaborators, especially Eugene Levy, turning two‑hander scenes into intricate little dances.
  • Genre fluidity: She moved between sketch comedy, family films, horror‑adjacent fantasy, indie mockumentary, and prestige TV drama‑comedy without ever looking miscast.
  • Emotional sincerity in camp: Even at her most flamboyant—Moira’s wigs, Cookie’s dog‑show anxiety—there was always a recognizable human fear or longing under the surface.

Where the Industry Fell Short

If there’s a critique to level, it’s aimed less at O’Hara than at Hollywood. For decades, she was too often bracketed as “supporting comic relief” or the quirky mom, while male colleagues were centered as auteurs or leads. Only in the 2010s did the culture catch up and start treating her as headline material.

That imbalance is part of what makes the Ebert.com tribute feel both celebratory and slightly rueful: we’re only just now, in the streaming‑era rewatch culture, grasping how foundational she’s been to modern screen comedy.


With Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, O’Hara helped define a distinct, improvisation‑driven school of American comedy. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Where to Start: A Catherine O’Hara Watchlist

To appreciate the full arc of O’Hara’s work—from scrappy sketch player to modern streaming icon—these titles form a solid, era‑spanning introduction:

  • SCTV (late 1970s–early 1980s) – The wild laboratory where she built dozens of alter egos.
  • Beetlejuice (1988) – Essential for her art‑world satire and early Burton collaboration.
  • Home Alone (1990) – The rare studio comedy where the heart of the film belongs to the mom.
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) – Showcases her range as a voice actor.
  • Best in Show (2000) – Peak Christopher Guest era; a cornerstone of mockumentary comedy.
  • A Mighty Wind (2003) – For the bittersweet, music‑infused side of her work.
  • Schitt’s Creek (2015–2020) – The late‑career triumph that turned her into a multi‑platform meme and Emmy winner.

Most of these titles are available across major streaming services, with Schitt’s Creek widely accessible on platforms like Netflix in many regions, keeping her work in active rotation for new viewers.


In The Nightmare Before Christmas, O’Hara’s voice performance as Sally added a gentle melancholy to a gothic fairy tale. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

After the Curtain Falls: Why Catherine O’Hara Matters

Catherine O’Hara’s passing in 2026 hits differently because her work still feels startlingly current. We’re living in an age of meme‑ified dialogue, elaborate character bits on TikTok, and TV comedies that double as emotional dramas—all spaces she helped prototype, often without the credit that comes with buzzword‑heavy think pieces.

The Ebert.com remembrance gets one thing exactly right: O’Hara was “constantly surprising.” That’s not just about jokes landing from unexpected angles; it’s about the shock of realizing, on a rewatch years later, that the “wacky side character” you remembered was actually the emotional heart of the scene.

As new audiences keep stumbling onto Schitt’s Creek, revisiting Home Alone each holiday season, or discovering the Guest films via streaming algorithms, Catherine O’Hara’s legacy will continue to unfold the way her best characters did: slowly, intricately, and with the kind of depth you only notice once the laughter finally quiets down.