Catherine O’Hara’s Screen Children Reunite at the Emmys to Remember a Canadian Comedy Great
Macaulay Culkin, Annie Murphy and Dan Levy speak during a tribute to Catherine O’Hara at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sept. 14, 2026.
Photo credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
At the 78th Emmy Awards on Sept. 14, Macaulay Culkin, Annie Murphy and Dan Levy came onto the stage together to remember Catherine O’Hara. Culkin had played Kevin McCallister opposite O’Hara’s increasingly frantic Kate McCallister in the first two Home Alone films. Murphy and Levy knew her as their television mother too, as Alexis and David Rose on Schitt’s Creek.
Culkin called her “mama” and remembered that O’Hara continued to show up for him long after Home Alone. Levy talked about learning to trust her instincts, including the clothes, wigs and wandering accent that became part of Moira Rose. Murphy’s memories travelled through Canada. After O’Hara died, she said, someone passed her a condolence note on an Air Canada flight, a gas-station attendant hugged her while she was driving north, and a woman at the LCBO performed a mashup of O’Hara characters while Murphy was trying to buy wine.
Catherine O’Hara in one of her more famous roles as Kevin’s mom.
Their tribute opened the Emmys’ In Memoriam segment before Noah Kahan performed “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as the ceremony remembered people from the television industry who had died during the year. O’Hara died Jan. 30 at 71. Her agency, CAA, said at the time that she had died following a brief illness. A Los Angeles County death certificate later obtained by the Associated Press listed a pulmonary embolism as the immediate cause of death and rectal cancer as the underlying cause.
Seven months later, the Emmy tribute centred on people who had known O’Hara as family, at least on screen. Her career had started half a century earlier in Toronto, where her first job at The Second City was waiting tables.
O’Hara was born in Toronto on March 4, 1954, and arrived at Second City without formal acting training. Her first attempt to join the company did not go particularly well. Second City’s account of her career says then-director Joe Flaherty advised her to “keep up the day job” and continue waitressing. In 1974, when Gilda Radner left for New York, O’Hara replaced her in the cast.
She later called Second City “my university,” crediting it with teaching her how to write, construct scenes and develop characters. It also put her among performers who would become central to Canadian comedy and remain part of her working life for decades. Eugene Levy was there, along with John Candy, Andrea Martin and Flaherty as the Toronto company developed into SCTV.
O’Hara wrote and performed on SCTV, creating characters including Lola Heatherton and Dusty Towne and doing impressions of performers and public figures ranging from Lucille Ball to Meryl Streep and Brooke Shields. In 1982, her work on the series earned her an Emmy for writing.
Some of the people she met during those years kept turning up throughout the rest of her career. O’Hara and Eugene Levy later appeared together in Christopher Guest’s largely improvised ensemble films Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. More than four decades after their Second City days, they became Moira and Johnny Rose.
O’Hara’s film career had already made her familiar well outside Canadian television. She played Delia Deetz in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice in 1988 and returned to the role for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in 2024. Two years after the first Beetlejuice, she became Kate McCallister in Home Alone, discovering after the family reached France that eight-year-old Kevin had been left behind in Chicago and beginning the increasingly desperate trip home. She returned for Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in 1992. Her voice work included The Nightmare Before Christmas, Frankenweenie and, late in her career, The Wild Robot.
Her work with Guest continued the improvisational approach that had been part of her training at Second City. In Best in Show, she and Levy played Cookie and Gerry Fleck, a married couple who arrive at a prestigious dog show with their Norwich terrier while Gerry is forced to endure a succession of encounters with men from Cookie’s past. In A Mighty Wind, they became former folk duo Mitch and Mickey. When the National Film Board made the 2021 short documentary Catherine O’Hara: All of Us Shine for her Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, it focused on O’Hara and what the NFB described as “the art of collaboration.”
That long working relationship with Eugene Levy eventually brought O’Hara back to Canadian television. When Levy asked her to play Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek, she was reluctant to commit to a series even though she trusted him. O’Hara told the Television Academy in 2019 that she agreed first to participate in a short presentation being made to sell the show. She enjoyed making it, and when the series moved ahead, she stayed.
Created by Eugene and Dan Levy, Schitt’s Creek premiered on CBC in 2015. O’Hara played a former soap star forced to relocate with her husband and two adult children after the wealthy Rose family loses its fortune, leaving them with one remaining asset: the small town they had once purchased as a joke.
O’Hara was given considerable freedom in building Moira. She worked with the elaborate wardrobe and constantly changing wigs and developed a way of speaking that could turn an ordinary word into something almost unrecognizable. In her Television Academy interview, O’Hara credited Eugene and Dan Levy with allowing her to experiment rather than asking her to settle on a conventional look or voice for the character.
The role earned her six consecutive Canadian Screen Awards for best actress in a comedy and, in 2020, the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series. The award came during Schitt’s Creek’s final-season sweep, with the ceremony operating from more than 100 remote locations during the COVID-19 pandemic while the show’s cast gathered in Toronto.
O’Hara won lead actress, Eugene Levy won lead actor, Annie Murphy won supporting actress and Dan Levy won supporting actor. The series also took comedy series, writing and directing during the telecast. Added to two Creative Arts wins, Schitt’s Creek finished with nine Emmys for its final season and became the first comedy to sweep the major comedy categories.
O’Hara was 66. Nearly four decades had passed since her first Emmy for writing on SCTV.
Canada had already recognized her career in several other ways. O’Hara was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2007, and in 2014 Canada Post included her in its Great Canadian Comedians stamp series with Jim Carrey, Olivier Guimond, Mike Myers and Martin Short. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2017 and invested in 2018. In 2021, she received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.
When Canada Post put her face on a stamp, O’Hara responded in characteristic fashion. She said she was honoured and flattered, then called it “a lovely gift I did nothing to deserve.”
She continued taking on new roles after Schitt’s Creek ended in 2020. In 2025, the Television Academy nominated her twice in the same year: for playing former studio head Patty Leigh in Apple TV’s The Studio and for her guest role as therapist Gail in HBO’s The Last of Us. By the end of her career, O’Hara had received 10 Emmy nominations and won twice.
The nominations arrived more than 50 years after she first joined Second City, and some of the people around her remained connected to those earliest years. Eugene Levy, whom she met in Toronto, was still working beside her on Schitt’s Creek decades later. His son Dan became one of the show’s creators, wrote for her and played her son.
After O’Hara died in January, tributes came from across the Canadian arts community and from the country’s political and cultural institutions. Governor General Mary Simon called her a “cultural trailblazer.” O’Hara had been appointed to the Order of Canada in 2017 and invested the following year, during Julie Payette’s tenure as governor general, before receiving the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in 2021.
By the time Murphy stood on the Emmy stage in September, she had already seen some of the public response herself. There was the note passed to her on an Air Canada flight and the hug from the gas-station attendant. Then there was the woman Murphy encountered at the LCBO, cycling through Catherine O’Hara characters while Murphy was trying to buy wine.
