How One Line in ‘Home Alone’ Made Catherine O’Hara a Pop-Culture Legend

30 Jan 2026, 22:38 · Rolling Stone

The unexpected death of Catherine O’Hara is difficult to process. Not only had she been a constant presence in film and television projects since her days on SCTV five decades ago, but she was enjoying a much-deserved late-career renaissance thanks to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and The Studio. O’Hara was just 71 when she died on Jan. 30, and it seemed like there was so much more to come.

O’Hara was an actress with incredible range. It didn’t matter if it was a prestige show like Six Feet Under, a big-screen dramedy like The Paper, or a cartoon like Chicken Little — if Catherine O’Hara was involved in any capacity, you knew she’d deliver something magnificent.

Her definitive role was probably family matriarch Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, the quirky Canadian comedy that ran for six seasons between 2015 and 2020. The show was a word-of-mouth favorite that suddenly got huge after its first couple of seasons. By the end, it had earned an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and an audience of young fans who largely had never even heard of SCTV.

But O’Hara’s most famous role, one that towers above the rest in terms of how many people on the planet have seen it and the place it occupies in the pop-culture universe, is Kate McCallister. Name doesn’t ring a bell? How about: the mom from Home Alone who somehow leaves her adolescent son stranded without his family on two occasions in just a couple of years.

In the first movie, Kate realizes midway through a flight to Paris that the McCallister clan has left their youngest alone back in a suburb of Chicago. In Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, it hits her at a luggage carousel in Florida. In both instances, O’Hara’s eyes widen, her neck tightens, and she lets out a banshee cry of “Kevin!” In the sequel, Kate actually passes out. (Part of her probably knows they’re going to get a visit from family services at this point.)

The line is just a single word, but O’Hara’s panicked delivery made it one of the most quoted moments from either movie. And over the years, she’s was asked to do it over and over. Check out this TikTok from five years ago where she absolutely nailed it. Around that time, she teamed up with Kevin Hart for a Chase commercial where she re-created it yet again.

How One Line in ‘Home Alone’ Made Catherine O’Hara a Pop-Culture Legend

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