Catherine O'Hara (1954-2026)

Catherine O'Hara was a terrific comedic actress, known for Beetlejuice, Home Alone, Schitt's Creek and all those mockumentaries she did with Eugene Levy, et al.

Me, I knew her best from Second City Television, where she usually played grandiose characters with no talent and a complete lack of self-awareness — Lola Heatherton, for example.



SCTV was to Saturday Night Live what Mozart was to a toddler banging on a tin pot with a wooden spoon ...

I admit, though, I was a bit surprised by how many tributes and deep-dive analyses of O'Hara's life and career accompanied her passing — in Atlantic magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. She was great, no question. Still ...

But, of course, she was the mom in Home Alone, a cultural touchstone for a generation. And while the movie centers on the kid and his buffoonish tormenters, Catherine O'Hara gives the movie its heart. I mean, she's not going to win any awards for Mother of the Year, and she's as unhinged as anybody else — maybe more so — but she'd also do anything to rescue her son.

And that's what writers have noted over and over again — O'Hara's gift for finding the humanity in even the craziest characters.

So, my pick for best supporting actress (comedy) in 1990 — Catherine O'Hara (Home Alone).

Which, of course, wasn't my pick a week ago. Well, that's the Mythical Monkey's dirty secret — nothing is final, ever, until (presumably) I die or the world ends.

There is no received wisdom, dispensed by priests or politicians, only the diploma you work for and never receive from what my Depression-era dad called "the college of hard knocks." Or as Somerset Maugham put it, "The path to Salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge."

That applies to movies as well, as far as I can see. Sure, you can study film in school (I studied law and the Philadelphia redhead) but you still have to watch the movies, with your opinion of the latest one informed by what you've seen before, and what you've seen before re-evaluated in light of what you've just newly seen.

Your knowledge of the movies — and your take on them — is forever in a state of flux. Just like life.

It never ends. Until, finally, it ends. Every man owes a death, Shakespeare said, and if you pay that debt today, well, you don't have to pay it tomorrow.

Or something like that.

In the meantime, you walk the path, always approaching, never arriving ...