Catherine O’Hara Proved That One-of-a-Kind Comedy Is a Team Sport

Improv comedy’s golden rule is to say, “Yes, and …” to advance a scene partner’s vision and raise the comedic stakes. Few understood this better than Catherine O’Hara, who died on Friday at age 71 after a brief illness. The Emmy and Golden Globe–winning actor had a knack for executing a writer-director’s vision, while remaining true to her singular sensibilities—a star and a team player all wrapped in one wildly entertaining performer.

“Why work alone if you don’t have to?” O’Hara told The New Yorker in 2019. Throughout her career, she stuck to that ethos, starting out with the Second City improv troupe in her native Toronto as an understudy for Gilda Radner in the 1970s. O’Hara’s cohort included many performers with whom she’d later share the screen—from her Home Alone scene partner John Candy to frequent costar (and one-time real-life love interest) Eugene Levy, who starred opposite O’Hara in four Christopher Guest films (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration) before their Emmy-winning turns as eccentric husband-and-wife Johnny and Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek.

“My crutch was, in improvs: when in doubt, play insane,” O’Hara said to The New Yorker. “Because you didn’t have to excuse anything that came out of your mouth. It didn’t have to make sense.” Yet, even the most far-fetched women—perhaps Home Alone’s forgetful Kate McAllister chief among them—felt undeniably human in the hands of O’Hara. After Second City, she helped create the sketch show SCTV, Canada’s answer to Saturday Night Live. When the series ended in 1984, O’Hara popped up in supporting roles like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), and Heartburn (1986), directed by Mike Nichols. But O’Hara’s real calling, she told Vulture in 2019, was “playing people who have no real sense of the impression they’re making on anyone else.”

That description was fitting of Delia Deetz, yuppie wicked stepmother to Winona Ryder’s macabre Lydia in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988). O’Hara met her husband, the film’s production designer Bo Welch, while making the movie. Her ability to screech “Day-O!” then lead a conga line of haunted dinner guests through a dance number in her abstractly decorated home left an impression. Burton and O’Hara made three more movies together, including the 2024 Beetlejuice sequel, as well as stop-motion films The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Frankenweenie (2012), in which “Weird Girl” was one of three characters she voiced for the feature.