A Theme Emerges in Catherine O'Hara Tributes

In the many tributes being written after the death of Catherine O'Hara, a clear theme has emerged. O'Hara was, as a headline at Slate puts it, "one of the great movie moms." Some snippets:

• The gut punch: When O'Hara as Kate McCallister in Home Alone finally makes it home to Kevin, her "hug tells him that, despite all the chaos, he is not forgotten—that he is loved," writes David Mack at Slate. "This was the source of her warmth. No wonder Culkin, even decades later as an adult, still called O'Hara 'mom.' In that moment, she feels like our mother too." It's probably why O'Hara's death at age 71 "seems to have hit so many of us like a gut punch."

• The Ur-mother: She was indeed "everyone's mom," a Vulture headline pronounces. "Without ever turning her own family into public figures, O'Hara became Ur-mother for an entire generation of kids who never before had a cultural model that so closely reflected their own experience of childhood," writes Kathryn VanArendonk. "She was not the perfect June Cleaver, nor was she a nightmarish, self-absorbed Mommy Dearest. She was flawed, she was stretched thin, and she made mistakes. Then, full of fury and self-recrimination and exhaustion, she asked her son for forgiveness, and she told him how much she loved him."
• The teacher: When Lindsey Karp first saw Home Alone as a kid, she identified with Kevin. Years later, she identified with O'Hara as a frazzled, imperfect mom trying to do a million things, she writes in HuffPost. And years after that, she identified with O'Hara's Moira Rose in Schitt's Creek, who showed that moms don't have to fit a certain mold. "Thank you, Catherine, for guiding me all the way from childhood to motherhood and beyond. Millennials like me couldn't have asked for a better teacher."
• A little out there: A piece from Dan Heching at CNN pronounces O'Hara the "birthmother of bizarre movie moms" and runs through examples that include her role as Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice. "Through the lens 2024, the character—who returns in this week's sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—is in many ways a hair-dye-and-formaldehyde-soaked antidote to the tradwife trend dominating social media."