Catherine O’Hara had incredible response when asked which role she would like to be remembered for
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, News, US News
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: Emma McIntyre/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, News, US News
As the world mourns a great actress, Catherine O'Hara previously shared the role that she would most like to be remembered for.
O'Hara's agent confirmed that she had died at her home in Los Angeles following a short illness on 30 January. Over a career in film and television spanning 50 years, the actress played an enormous number of roles in classic films and shows. She played an iconic role in the 80s horror comedy Beetlejuice, voiced rag doll Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and was the mother of Kevin in Home Alone and Home Alone 2.
Her performance as the eccentric Moira Rose in Schitt's Creek led to O'Hara having a leap later in her career, with the comedy seeing the formerly wealthy Rose family living in a motel in a town they once bought as a joke after financial ruin. O'Hara's performance as Moira, the flamboyant former Broadway actor with an endlessly shifting accent, who somehow managed to rescue her expansive wardrobe and collection of wigs from the bailiffs, stuck out in a show full of strong performances.
So, there's no denying that O'Hara had a rich and varied professional life, and she certainly had a lot of different roles to choose from. However, in a in a brief interview prior to her death, she actually shared the role she would most like to be remembered for.
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Asked the question by a reporter, she replied: "Mother of my children."
O'Hara was a mother of two sons, which she shared with her husband Bo Welch, and her agent confirmed that the family would be holding a private celebration of her life.
Her sons, Matthew and Luke, have both gone on to work in film and TV themselves, but as set designers rather than actors. The actress even told Vanity Fair that she's worked with her sons. On Schitt's Creek, they were both involved in the sitcom, with one as a set dresser, and the other in set construction.
Speaking on a 2024 episode of the Wiser Than Me podcast, she also opened up about the importance of family to her when she was offered a job in London.
"In deciding what work I might get involved in for my whole working life, my family's always come first," she said.
"I have two sons, and when they were babies, I thought, 'What's the point?' What's the point in having children if I'm not going to be with them, so that was always number one consideration and always will be."
Tributes have poured in to the actor after her death on January 30, including from her Schitt's Creek co-star and friend of many years Eugene Levy.
Levy played Johnny Rose, the doting husband and comedic straight-man to O'Hara's Moira, and said in a statement: "Words seem inadequate to express the loss I feel today. I had the honor of knowing and working with the great Catherine O’Hara for over fifty years.
"From our beginnings on the Second City stage, to SCTV, to the movies we did with Chris Guest, to our six glorious years on Schitt’s Creek, I cherished our working relationship, but most of all our friendship."