JANUARY 30, 2026

By Kathryn VanArendonk

Photo: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images

Catherine O’Hara, who died January 30 in Los Angeles, will be remembered for her remarkable capacity to convey enormous feeling with the smallest movement of her face. She could slide from pleasant blankness to overwrought terror in an instant; she could wield immense power with a polite nod. With her frequent onscreen partner Eugene Levy, O’Hara morphed into a dozen different guises: She was the wide-eyed innocent in Waiting for Guffman, then weaponized that naïveté into a steely competence in Best in Show. By A Mighty Wind, she was Levy’s world-weary ex, like a frustrated and folksy Stevie Nicks to his curt Lindsey Buckingham, each of them equally manipulative and wounded.  

But O’Hara is best known for her role as Kate McCallister in Home Alone, the distracted, frantic, righteously determined mom to Macaulay Culkin’s precocious 8-year-old Kevin. Without ever turning her own family into public figures, O’Hara became Ur-mother for an entire generation of kids who never before had a cultural model that so closely reflected their own experience of childhood. She was not the perfect June Cleaver, nor was she a nightmarish, self-absorbed Mommy Dearest. She was flawed, she was stretched thin, and she made mistakes. Then, full of fury and self-recrimination and exhaustion, she asked her son for forgiveness, and she told him how much she loved him. 

March 4, 1954 - January 30, 2026

➼ Celebrate the work of Catherine O'Hara with Cinematrix and Telematrix grids inspired by her.

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