The curtain has fallen on one of the most brilliant comedic minds of her generation. Catherine O’Hara, the chameleon-like actress who brought us the unforgettable Moira Rose, the panicked Kate McCallister, and a host of Christopher Guest eccentrics, has died. She was 71.

Her agent confirmed that O’Hara passed away peacefully at her Los Angeles home on Friday following a brief illness. The news has sent a wave of grief through Hollywood and beyond, with tributes pouring in for the Canadian star whose career spanned five decades of laughter.

The Woman of a Thousand Faces

To call O’Hara a "comic actress" feels like an understatement; she was a force of nature. From her early days in the improvised chaos of SCTV alongside John Candy and Eugene Levy, she possessed a rare ability to disappear completely into a character. She didn't just play funny roles; she crafted intricate, bizarre, and deeply human portraits of absurdity.

For a generation, she was simply "Kevin’s mom" in Home Alone, delivering the scream heard around the world. For another, she was the possessed artiste Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice. But it was her late-career renaissance as the vocabulary-mangling soap star Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek that cemented her status as a legend. Moira was a high-wire act of accent, fashion, and pathos that swept every major acting award in 2021.

• The Tributes: "There is less light in my world," wrote Pedro Pascal, capturing the mood of fans worldwide. Meryl Streep, a longtime friend, remembered her as a beacon of "whipsmart compassion." Her frequent collaborator Eugene Levy simply said, "I have lost my sister in comedy. The silence is deafening."
• The Legacy: O’Hara proved that women in comedy didn't have to play the straight man or the ditsy girlfriend. They could be weird, loud, unlikable, and utterly magnetic. She paved the way for the likes of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph.

The Final Bow

It is poignant that her passing comes just as she was exploring new dramatic depths in recent projects. But her legacy is already secure. She taught us to laugh at our own pretensions, to embrace the "bébé" in all of us, and to wear our wigs with pride.

Catherine O’Hara has left the building, but the laughter she generated will echo for decades. As Moira Rose might have said, in her inscrutable trans-Atlantic drawl: "She has departed for the great, glitzy premiere in the sky, leaving us all decidedly... bereft."