The star of Home Alone and Schitt’s Creek on family, improv, and the importance of laughter
By Simon Button
ENTERTAINMENT
INTERVIEWING CATHERINE O’HARA is a breathtaking experience. She’s animated one minute, deadpan the next, vocalising ten to the dozen as anecdotes and insights tumble over one another. At one point she apologises for being so garrulous, saying: “I just keep talking, hoping something that makes sense will come out at some point.”
But I wouldn’t have it any other way, as all the iconic characters she’s played—from the literally haunted sculptress in Beetlejuice to Kevin’s desperate-to-get-home mother in Home Alone, via her improvised hilarity in all those Christopher Guest mockumentaries to, of course, the side-splittingly eccentric Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek—flash before my eyes.
Now 69, O’Hara is such a familiar face with so much on her CV it’s perhaps no surprise that many people have a hard time placing her when they spot her in public. “I get that a lot,” she grins. “For the most part they say, ‘Hey, why do I know you?’. I don’t want to say, ‘I’m an actor’ so I’ll go, ‘I don’t know, from a restaurant maybe?’”.
Eventually they realise they’ve seen her in films or on TV. “They’ll go, ‘Well, what have you done?’. You’re standing there giving your resume and they’ll go, ‘No, didn’t see that’. They lift you up and they take you down, which is as it should be.”
We’re talking on Zoom some 30 minutes later than planned because “I asked for an extension so I could rush home and get some make-up on”. Wearing a pink jacket over a white shirt, her dark-rimmed specs are as stylish as the kitchen she’s sitting in and she is, as I say, the most garrulous of interviewees.
“But I love listening, I swear to you,” Catherine insists, “and I hope the people I work with would agree. I love being off-camera and I love watching other people work.” She laughs. “I mean, obviously I can go on and on but I don’t think I’m really saying anything.”
That’s probably just as well when it comes to her latest film Argylle, a high-octane action comedy directed by Matthew Vaughn in which Bryce Dallas Howard’s spy novelist Elly Conway is plunged Romancing the Stone-style into the world she’s been writing about. The script hinges on so many twists and turns that O’Hara isn’t at liberty to say anything about her character beyond the fact she’s conn
