When I saw Home Alone for the first time, I was supposed to get a kick out of all the deathtraps Kevin had set up for the robbers, and I’m sure I liked that part okay. But I was more transfixed by everything that happens before. This kid’s experiences living alone in his nice house, and his mom’s harried efforts to get back home. Something about Kevin’s mom (who’s named Kate, but come on, she’s just Kevin’s Mom) really grabbed me. She reminded me of my mother a little, which was something I often sought out in movies (see: Diane Keaton in Baby Boom), but she more reminded me of someone else, the mother of two brothers with whom my sister and I were friends. 

Their family was casual, WASPy rich and the boys were blond, so Kevin always seemed like some combination of the two; his sweetness was one brother, his mischievousness the other. And Kevin’s mom had similar hair to their mom (their dad also looked like Kevin’s dad, a little—enough to grab onto when I was 7 or 8 years old) and the same sort of brusque, pragmatic energy. I loved Kevin’s mom, and therefore loved the actress playing her, who gets one of the most famous comedy moments of the movie (a first-class plane flight suddenly disturbed by horrible revelation) but also does the more dramatic stuff with arresting naturalism. All of her motherly tics and tones are so precise, so exact. It was hard to believe she could ever be anyone but Kevin’s mom. 

What a joy, then, to spend the next 35 years discovering so many of Catherine O’Hara’s other facets. Her humor, her strangeness, her Canadian humility—which, I think, allowed her to be so funny and strange without it ever feeling self-conscious. Of course, the Christopher Guest movies became the holy Books of O’Hara, movies I would watch over and over again throughout college and beyond, marveling that someone could be as specifically funny as O’Hara, that she could be so clued into such minute modes of behavior. And yet, she was also so big, so loopy and vivid. She was a magician, but not one whose powers enough people seemed to appreciate. Why was she not one of the most famous actors on the planet?

Maybe she didn’t want it that way, or Hollywood never knew quite where to place her. Maybe she was best as a cultishly beloved figure whose occasional pops into view were all the more exciting because of their relative rarity. Those who dearly loved and cataloged her sideways turns as a maybe crazy ice cream truck driver in After Hours, or a singing franken-doll in A Nightmare Before Christmas were lucky members of a little club, those who understood that she, not Michael Keaton, was the funniest and best part of Beetlejuice. May I recommend that, if you haven’t sought it out already, her all too brief but gonzo turn on an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 7, a role that might be a little iffy in these modern times of ours, but if you can watch it in a vacuum . . . oh boy.

I know I was by no means alone in that fandom, but it did feel at least a little exclusive. Which is why it was both thrilling and a little disappointing, strangely, when she finally gained the kind of international esteem she’d long deserved with Schitt’s Creek. Yes, yes, it was exciting that O’Hara was winning awards and making the talk show rounds and was at long last being hailed as one of the greats, but I stupidly felt sort of proprietary over her, like this precious thing was going to be spoiled by exposure to that much oxygen. 

Which didn’t actually happen, of course. But I suddenly found myself needing to firmly establish my Catherine O’Hara bonafides and confirm those of others, to make sure that everyone who claimed to love her actually knew the intricacies of her work and career like I imagined I did. (In reality, I had been way late to the game myself—I’d never seen SCTV when I first fell in love with her.) Eventually, though, I let go of that silliness and was simply glad that she got to experience the adventure of that kind of mass adoration—of that kind of fame, even. I hope she had a blast. 

She certainly seemed to be enjoying herself in interviews, though her public appearances were always laced with a little dollop of chagrin, a genial embarrassment at being so lavishly feted. When faced with such attention, she tended to return to a joke, self-deprecating or not. One that lowered the stakes and calmed the air and, most important to her, made people laugh. What a gift she had, and what a gift it was—and always will be—to bask in the warmth and weirdness of her particular genius.