NEWS / Late actress Catherine O’Hara battled cancer – death certificate

Canadian-American actress Catherine O’Hara died of a pulmonary embolism but was also battling rectal cancer, according to a death certificate obtained by TMZ. The vital record further indicates that she was cremated and her remains were given to her husband Bo Welch.

O’Hara passed away on January 30 after being rushed to a Los Angeles hospital having reported difficulty breathing. At the time of her death, her agency, Creative Artists Agency reported that she had passed “following a brief illness”, according to Page Six.

O’Hara’s treatment was exacerbated by her having Situs inversus, an extremely rare condition in which all of an individual’s organs appear on the opposite side of their body (e.g. the liver being on the left and the heart being on the right). The condition is typically harmless, but can complicate medical diagnosis. Page Six reports that singers Enrique Iglesias and Donny Osmond also suffer from the condition.

A native of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, O’Hara started her career at The Second City performance arts theater in her hometown. She garnered attention for her televised comedy sketches known as Second City Television for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award. She played the role of an unstable ice cream truck driver in the absurdist After Hours (1985) by Martin Scorsese and had a secondary role in Heartburn (1986), which featured Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

O’Hara became widely known to the general audience after appearing in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) before going on to achieve worldwide fame in playing Kevin McCallister’s mother Kate in Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992). She continued appearing in comedies, most notably in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003), as well as the comedy For Your Consideration (2006). She also provided her voice to characters in A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Chicken Little (2005), Monster House (2006), and a number of other animated films.

After a slight downturn in the number of major movie roles, O’Hara experienced a career resurgence in 2015 playing the role of soap opera star Moira Rose in the CBS sitcom Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020), for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series as well as a Golden Globe Award. She most recently appeared in Apple TV+’s comedy show The Studio (2025) and the HBO post-apocalyptic drama The Last Us (2025).

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