"Catherine O'Hara, who died January 30 in Los Angeles, will be remembered for her capacity to convey enormous feeling with the smallest movement of her face. She could slide from pleasant blankness to overwrought terror in an instant; she could wield immense power with a polite nod. With her frequent onscreen partner Eugene Levy, O'Hara morphed into a dozen different guises: She was the wide-eyed innocent in Waiting for Guffman, then weaponized that naïveté into a steely competence in Best in Show."
"But O'Hara is best known for her role as Kate McCallister in Home Alone, the distracted, frantic, righteously determined mom to Macaulay Culkin's precocious 8-year-old Kevin. Without ever turning her own family into public figures, O'Hara became Ur-mother for an entire generation of kids who never before had a cultural model that so closely reflected their own experience of childhood."
Catherine O'Hara displayed a rare ability to convey enormous feeling with the smallest facial movement. She moved effortlessly from pleasant blankness to overwrought terror and could wield power with a polite nod. She collaborated frequently with Eugene Levy, appearing in Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, shifting from wide-eyed innocence to steely competence and world-weary complexity. Her most famous role was Kate McCallister in Home Alone, portraying a distracted, frantic, yet righteously determined mother who is flawed, stretched thin, and capable of remorse. O'Hara's performance made an implausible plot emotionally believable by conveying horror, guilt, and love.
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