Catherine O’Hara, who died Friday at age 71, was beloved by LGBTQ+ audiences for many roles over her long career. Here we look at her five (arguably) most iconic ones. In addition to these, you might want to check out her performances as the forgetful mom in the Home Alone franchise, as a hostile Mr. Softee driver in Martin Scorsese’s urban nightmare comedy After Hours, and as a variety of characters on SCTV.
“Schitt’s Creek,” 2015-2020
For six seasons, O’Hara played Moira Rose, an aging actress and matriarch of a once-wealthy family who, having lost all their money, relocate to a small-town motel in the hit series Schitt’s Creek. She “delivered razor-edged one-liners dripping with SAT vocabulary words while sporting couture and any number of the ‘gals’ from her infamous wig wall,” Tracy E. Gilchrist wrote in The Advocate in 2020. In the series finale that year, she dressed as the pope to officiate the marriage of her son, David (Dan Levy, the son of Eugene Levy, who played Moira’s husband), and Patrick (Noah Reid).
Related: Threesomes, Marriage, Kids: Schitt’s Creek Depicts a Modern Gay Couple
Related: Eugene Levy reflects on fatherhood with a gay son, Schitt’s Creek, and strategic allyship
“Beetlejuice,” 1988
In Beetlejuice, O’Hara is Delia Deetz, an obnoxious woman who moves with her husband (Jeffrey Jones) and daughter (Winona Ryder) into a charming New England home occupied by the ghosts of its former owners, the Maitlands (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin). Delia redecorates the house in supremely poor taste, swapping out a flowered sofa for one constructed of boilerplate and pony hide, and she and her family generally annoy the heck out of the ghosts. The Maitlands call in Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) to scare off the Deetzes. O’Hara reprised the role in 2024’s sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
“Waiting for Guffman,” 1996
O’Hara was a key member of actor-director Christopher Guest’s stock company for his mockumentaries. In Waiting for Guffman, she and Fred Willard play travel agents who’ve never left the small town of Blaine, Missouri. They audition for community theater director Corky St. Clair (Guest) for a pageant to celebrate the town’s 150th anniversary with a hilariously bad rendition of “Midnight at the Oasis.”
“Best in Show,” 2000
Before Schitt’s Creek, O’Hara and Eugene Levy played a married couple in Best in Show, Guest’s mockumentary about dog shows and the quirky people who bring their canines to compete. At the show in the film, O’Hara’s character, Cookie Fleck, encounters many past lovers, all to the surprise of her husband, Gerry (Levy).
“A Mighty Wind,” 2003
O’Hara and Levy were together again in Guest’s A Mighty Wind, a mockumentary about a reunion of folk groups from the 1960s. O’Hara is Mickey Crabbe, half of the duo Mitch and Mickey, and Levy’s Mitch still has a broken heart over Mickey not returning his love. “A Mighty Wind is glutted with inspired details … but it all boils down to Mitch and Mickey, whose culminating performance onstage verges on the transcendent,” Michael Atkinson wrote in The Village Voice.
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