I never met Catherine O’Hara: Her death has stayed with me

February 2, 2026 — 11:45am

I didn’t know Canadian actress and comedian Catherine O’Hara. I never interviewed her, never exchanged pleasantries backstage, never sat across a cafe table dissecting the business of show. And yet her death has stayed with me, heavier than expected, quieter but deeper, lingering longer than logic would suggest.

Because this is the strange intimacy of celebrity culture: we don’t know these people, yet somehow they know us.

For six seasons of Schitt’s Creek, I hung on every syllable of Moira Rose, every operatic vowel, every couture and personally named wig, the WARDROBE!, every theatrical pause that somehow managed to be both ridiculous and brilliant. It wasn’t just comedy. It was comfort viewing. Ritual television. Emotional familiarity in a world that increasingly feels chaotic.

Moira Rose wasn’t just a wealthy woman who lost everything. She was resilience in sequins. Reinvention in a power wig(s). Vulnerability disguised as theatrical excess. Her Schitt’s story arc was stripped of privilege, forced into humility, a slow rebuild of identity, mirrored something many people recognise, even if they’ve never owned a designer handbag (or wig) in their lives.

Celebrity culture often gets dismissed as shallow, obsessed with fame for fame’s sake. But at its best, it isn’t about worship, it’s about shared emotional experience. We don’t grieve the person we never met. We grieve the moments they helped us survive.

O’Hara mastered something rare: making absurdity feel human. Her characters were flamboyant, eccentric, exaggerated but beneath the layers was truth. Fear of ageing. Fear of irrelevance. Fear of loss. Fear of starting again. Universal themes dressed in fabulous costumes.

But Moira was only one chapter of O’Hara’s extraordinary cultural footprint.

For an entire generation, she will forever be the frantic, fiercely loving mother in Home Alone. Then there was Beetlejuice, where she helped define an era of wonderfully weird cinema. And let’s not forget her legendary work in Christopher Guest’s mockumentary universe, films like Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind, where improvisation met genius. These weren’t scripted performances. They were living, breathing character studies delivered with razor timing and emotional intelligence. Comedy at its smartest.

Here’s the thing: some celebrity deaths don’t just land, they thud. Not because we knew these people but because they quietly moved into our lives and never really left. They were there on our screens after bad days, during heartbreaks, in share-house lounges, on sick days, on Sunday nights when life felt a bit beige and needed a binge.

These aren’t just famous faces. They’re emotional bookmarks. Era markers. Mood-setters. Memory triggers. When they go, it’s not only about losing them, it’s about losing the version of us that existed when they first made us laugh, cry, swoon or feel seen.

Timing plays a role too. A death that lands during an already emotionally fragile cultural moment like the one we are in stacks up. Add in some potent nostalgia and suddenly, I’m not weeping sad, but am having show flashbacks.

And then there’s legacy. The ones who leave behind comfort, humour, representation and warmth don’t disappear quietly. They leave a little emotional echo.

So no, it’s not weird. It’s not dramatic. It’s human. It’s cultural. It’s collective grief in a Moira Rose wig.

Which brings me back to why some celebrity deaths resonate more deeply than others. Some stars are admired from afar. Others quietly move into our living rooms, our routines, our emotional memory banks. We watch them while stuck in the laundry. While eating dinner alone. While nursing heartbreak. While laughing with friends. Over time, they become emotional landmarks. Not because of who they are, but because of where we were when we watched them.

That’s why her death doesn’t feel like losing “a celebrity”. It feels like losing a cultural companion.

There’s also something quietly powerful about collective mourning. When a beloved figure passes, millions of strangers pause together. Social feeds soften. Quotes are reshared. Scenes replay. Gratitude rises. For a brief moment, culture stops scrolling and starts remembering.

And perhaps that’s the real legacy. Not the box office numbers. Not the awards. Not the red carpet gowns. But the emotional fingerprints left behind.

O’Hara – actor, comedian, wife and mum – didn’t just entertain. She gave us comedy with intelligence. Heart with humour. Characters that stayed. And in doing so, she reminded us that art, even when delivered through wigs, slapstick or one-liners, has the power to connect strangers across generations and continents.

So yes, it makes sense that her death hurts because she wasn’t just an actor we admired, she was a presence we felt.

A performer who gave us laughter when we needed relief, glamour when we needed escapism, and heart when we didn’t even realise we were looking for it. In a noisy, chaotic celebrity ecosystem, she managed to feel strangely intimate. Which is the real magic trick.

So yes, we grieve differently now. Publicly. Collectively. Online. But the emotion itself is timeless. When someone leaves behind joy, comfort and cultural fingerprints, they don’t really disappear. They simply become part of the soundtrack of who we are. And honestly? That’s a pretty fabulous legacy.

Melissa Hoyer is a cultural and social commentator.

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