Actress Catherine O’Hara died primarily of a pulmonary embolism and had rectal cancer, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office revealed Monday.
The cancer was an underlying cause of death, according to a death certificate obtained by TMZ. The document said her husband Robert “Bo” Welch had been given her cremated remains.
O’Hara died at age 71 at her Los Angeles home on Jan. 30 “following a brief illness,” her manager told the Daily News at the time, without divulging further details.
The actress had been private about her cancer diagnosis, which did not come out until her death certificate was released. She had been rushed to the hospital with a medical emergency at about 5 a.m. that day and was having difficulty breathing, TMZ reported at the time. She was listed in serious condition, the Los Angeles Fire Department told the outlet, and was pronounced dead hours later of a blood clot in her lung.
The Canadian-born comic actor who launched her career at sketch comedy show “Second City Television,” known as “SCTV,” and earned acclaim as the harried mom to Macaulay Culkin in the first two “Home Alone” movies in the early 1990s.
O’Hara was also seen in “After Hours,” the 1985 dark comedy about urban nightlife gone pear-shaped, a performance that Rolling Stone said was “the glue” that held the movie together. In 1988 and 2024 she starred in Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” and its sequel. She worked with Burton again in “The Nightmare Before Christmas” in 1993.
Most recently, her comedic talents coalesced in “Schitt’s Creek” as she played the matriarch of a wealthy but down-on-their-luck family forced to live in a tiny town devoid of the amenities they were accustomed to. For that she won Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series at the 2020 Emmys, as well as a Golden Globe and two SAG awards.
