Do we like Catherine O'Hara?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of decent work, open support for LGBTQ+ people and real charity, with no harm found; a 10 would need a longer paper trail.
Catherine Anne O'Hara was born in Toronto in 1954, the second youngest of seven kids, and grew up in suburban Etobicoke. She started out waitressing at Toronto's Second City, ended up understudying Gilda Radner, and stepped into the cast when Radner left in 1974.
From there she was in the first cast of SCTV in 1976 and became the show's resident funny woman. The big screen followed: Beetlejuice, Home Alone, and a long run of Christopher Guest mockumentaries like Best in Show. Then, in her sixties, Schitt's Creek turned Moira Rose into a global phenomenon and won her an Emmy.
Now the harm check, which is the whole point of this page. We went looking for anything nasty about trans people, women, migrants or the planet, or any run of dodgy company, and came up empty. Her recent work is The Studio with Seth Rogen and Kathryn Hahn, The Last of Us on HBO and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which is about as clean a slate as you'll get.
On the positive side, she was openly in LGBTQ+ people's corner. Speaking about Schitt's Creek in a 2019 Gay Times interview, she said other shows should follow suit and present humans as the best we can be. Queer outlets after her death called her a celebrated ally, and Moira's mother-of-David role is a big part of why.
She wasn't shy about politics when it counted. In a March 2025 podcast she responded to Trump's talk of making Canada the 51st state, saying it made her want to be in Ontario right now, and that it made her skin crawl. She also said the one upside was that it was unifying Canadians. Where you land on that depends on how you feel about Trump, but it's a view about her own country, not a dig at any group of people.
The good stuff goes beyond the trophies. She supported the Terry Fox Foundation for years and often fronted its annual run. In 2020 she won $250,000 on a celebrity round of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and gave all of it to a Los Angeles nonprofit that helps homeless families find housing.