{"id":2259276,"date":"2026-01-31T04:10:24","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T04:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2259276"},"modified":"2026-01-31T04:10:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T04:10:24","slug":"catherine-ohara-showed-us-it-was-ok-to-be-an-imperfect-mom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/catherine-ohara-showed-us-it-was-ok-to-be-an-imperfect-mom\/","title":{"rendered":"Catherine O\u2019Hara Showed Us It Was OK To Be An Imperfect Mom"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I\u2019ve always had a soft spot for actors who can play completely opposite characters, like it requires zero effort; Catherine O\u2019Hara<\/a> was one of the best.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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O\u2019Hara, who starred in \u201cHome Alone,\u201d \u201cSchitt\u2019s Creek,\u201d \u201cBest in Show\u201d and \u201cBeetlejuice,\u201d died at just 71 years old, her team told celebrity.land on Friday. Instantly, my eyes welled with tears when I found out on Instagram, and I asked myself, why am I emotional about her death? <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Surely, she was a great actor, but I\u2019m not one to cry at the loss of a celebrity I only know from television shows and movies. I was sad when Heath Ledger and Brittany Murphy died because their lives were cut far too short. In my own way, I mourned their deaths, but I didn\u2019t cry. As I thought about O\u2019Hara \u2014 an unforgettable, vivacious woman \u2014 I remembered why I love her so much. Suddenly, my tears made perfect sense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHome Alone\u201d was released in 1990, when I was only in first grade. I was a mama\u2019s girl, closer to my mother than anyone else in my world. From the moment I first saw the beautiful, red-haired mother Kate McCallister on the big screen, I recognized a mom who cared about her family. I followed her from first-class seats on American Airlines when she first realized she\u2019d left her son at home to the airport in \u201cHome Alone 2\u201d where she screamed \u201cKevin!\u201d at baggage claim. At the time, I was just a young girl, and Kate\u2019s commitment to making her way home to be with her son on Christmas in \u201cHome Alone\u201d triggered the warmth every kid yearns for; she became the movie mom of my generation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Catherine<\/div>\n
Catherine O’Hara Film Home Alone (1992)<\/div>\n
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Fast forward to 2011 when I joined the land of motherhood myself \u2014 it wasn\u2019t long before I was rewatching \u201cHome Alone\u201d with my boys every holiday season and seeing O\u2019Hara in a whole new light. Suddenly, she was me; a mother trying to maintain a household, the lives of multiple children, work and literally everything in between. Like me, she was imperfect and prone to mistakes that inevitably creep in when life becomes overwhelming. As a child, Kevin McCallister became the kid I looked up to for his bravery and cleverness in defeating Harry and Marv, but as a mother, Kate showed me that imperfection is enough.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2015, just when I thought I couldn\u2019t love O\u2019Hara any more than I already did, she joined the cast of \u201cSchitt\u2019s Creek\u201d and gave me my favorite television series and graced Hollywood with a beloved character like no one else ever seen on screen before. At the Rosebud Motel, Moira Rose proved that elegance and class don\u2019t stem from luxurious living quarters, but from within. She reminded me that being a woman with a mighty personality who doesn\u2019t fit into the mold society sets for us is the best way to be, and it was OK if folding in the cheese wasn\u2019t a recipe step I\u2019d ever completed. Once again, she was an imperfect mother, and I could be, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2019, O\u2019Hara told the New Yorker<\/a> that she was initially scared of being on stage. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cMy crutch was, in improvs, when in doubt, play insane. Because you didn\u2019t have to excuse anything that came out of your mouth. It didn\u2019t have to make sense,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Eugene<\/div>\n
Eugene Levy, from left, Annie Murphy, Dan Levy and Catherine O’Hara arrive at the “Schitt’s Creek” FYC Event at the Saban Media Center at the Television Academy in 2019.<\/div>\n
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In that moment, I realized she was the same perfectly imperfect woman in real life, and I loved her even more for it. At that same time, as I was testing the waters of the writing world, hoping to inch my way into the community I\u2019d watched from afar for so long, she gave me inspiration to ignore the fear and the negative voices telling me I wasn\u2019t enough. Because of her, I pushed on.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I don\u2019t often mourn the loss of someone I only know from the big screen. But O\u2019Hara as Kate McCallister was the on-screen mother my 6-year-old self recognized as flawless, despite her imperfections. She later became the mother I looked up to for being unapologetically herself; Moira never lost herself in motherhood and that was something to celebrate.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Thank you, Catherine, for guiding me all the way from childhood to motherhood and beyond. <\/span>Millennials like me couldn\u2019t have asked for a better teacher.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.celebrity.land \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve always had a soft spot for actors who can play completely opposite characters, like it requires zero effort; Catherine O\u2019Hara was one of the best. O\u2019Hara, who starred in \u201cHome Alone,\u201d \u201cSchitt\u2019s Creek,\u201d \u201cBest in Show\u201d and \u201cBeetlejuice,\u201d died at just 71 years old, her team told celebrity.land on Friday. Instantly, my eyes welled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2259277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[437472,322225,307441],"class_list":["post-2259276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-catherine-o","tag-motherhood","tag-parenting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Catherine-OHara-Showed-Us-It-Was-OK-To-Be-An.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2259276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2259276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2259276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2259278,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2259276\/revisions\/2259278"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2259277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2259276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2259276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2259276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}