Catherine O’Hara was already comedy royalty in Canada when she became known across the world thanks to her role in the 1990 blockbuster “Home Alone.” In a movie packed with memorable pratfalls and a precocious performance by a young Macaulay Culkin, it’s O’Hara who provides one of its most enduring moments.
It comes when she, as the mother of Culkin’s Kevin McCallister, realizes that her son has been left behind while the family flies to France at Christmas. She gives a wide-eyed look to the camera as it zooms in on her, and lets out a sharp, resonating cry: “KEVIN!” It became an instantly identifiable pop culture moment and a perfect example of the actress’s flair for outsize gestures.
The Emmy-winning actress, who died at the age of 71 on Friday, was one of those performers who was simply a delight to see onscreen every time she appeared. She started with the improv comedy troupe Second City in Toronto and the show “SCTV,” where she helped define an era of Canadian comedy alongside co-stars including Martin Short, John Candy and Eugene Levy. As her career progressed, a through line could be found in many of O’Hara’s most popular roles: She excelled at playing a particular type of manic, upper-class female artist. This woman comes from a background of fame and wealth but has, for some reason or another, been exiled, left with just her narcissism and overinflated sense of artistic merit. She doesn’t seem to live in the real world, but rather some self-narrated series where she is the star.
In 1988, O’Hara played Delia Deetz, the droll and eccentric stepmother to Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz, in “Beetlejuice.” Adorned with elaborate hair and fashion, Delia makes unnerving abstract sculptures and whines about her quaint, artless new life away from the city. When the Deetz family discovers their new house is haunted, Delia isn’t put off; in fact, she invites the supernatural. O’Hara’s shrewd performance — in one scene, she blusters to her husband that if she can’t redecorate their new home, “I will go insane and I will take you with me” — stresses that Delia, with her vanity and bourgie tastes, can be just as ghastly as the undead.
Moira Rose, the dramatic mother of “Schitt’s Creek,” for which O’Hara won her first acting Emmy, could easily be Delia Deetz’s long lost sister. A socialite similarly exiled to a rural town, Moira is a former soap opera actress whose obliviousness is matched only by the size of her ostentatious wig collection. Moira saunters into rooms with a new affect for every mood, dipping into cobbled together accents and exploding into grand exclamations of excitement or terror over the smallest setbacks.
The same outsize reactions characterized O’Hara’s most recent role, as a former studio head prematurely ousted from her job in the Apple TV satirical comedy “The Studio.” Though criminally underused in the series, O’Hara delivered the perfect touch of megalomaniacal chaos and Hollywood-style resentment needed to take the show’s cringe comedy to the next level.
In each case, O’Hara poked fun at the stereotype that unknowing fans might think she herself fell into: a self-serious actress with a temper and an overdramatic sensibility. But few actresses could make the most pretentious and self-involved characters, like the undeniable Moira Rose, appealing. And even fewer could make such a delicious meal out of onscreen excess: a practiced, preening tone of voice; a pair of perilously raised eyebrows; a deranged fake smile; a squeal, a shriek, a full-out scream.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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