The Toronto Second City

The 2020 Emmy is where most accounts of Catherine O'Hara begin. Donovan Hadley's biography refuses to treat it as the summit. The Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, awarded for Moira Rose, recognised late what the Best in Show and Beetlejuice years had earned her many times over, and a book that starts there has already missed most of the career.

So this one opens earlier. Catherine Anne O'Hara, born March 4, 1954, in Toronto, Ontario, the second of seven children of an Irish-Canadian Catholic family. She started at the Second City Toronto theatre in 1974 alongside John Candy, Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin, joined the cast of the SCTV Network's Second City Television in 1976, and took two consecutive Emmy Awards for writing on the series, in 1981 and 1982.

The parts most audiences know came next. Kate McCallister in Home Alone and Home Alone 2. Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice, and again in the long-delayed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice of 2024. The Christopher Guest mockumentary cycle: Waiting for Guffman in 1996, Best in Show in 2000, A Mighty Wind in 2003, For Your Consideration in 2006. Then Moira Rose, across six seasons of Schitt's Creek on CBC and Netflix from 2015 to 2020, a role the Levys, father and son, had built around her.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in late 2025 and died of it on January 30, 2026, at seventy-one. Hadley follows the arc through all of it: the Toronto childhood, the early Second City years, the Guest films, the Schitt's Creek run, the return to Delia Deetz. Fifty years of work that was the connective tissue of the Canadian comedy export, and one award at the end of it that arrived long after the case had been made.