Saturday Night Live paid tribute to former host Catherine O’Hara following her death at age 71.
The NBC sketch comedy show aired a throwback bumper featuring O’Hara alongside a lower-third of her name during the live show on Saturday, January 31, which featured guest host Alexander Skarsgård and musical guest Cardi B.
A spokesperson for O’Hara confirmed to Us Weekly on Friday, January 30, that she’d died following a “brief illness” and that a “private celebration of life will be held by the family.” Per a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson, paramedics transported O’Hara to a local hospital in “serious condition” on Friday — and PageSix reported that she’d previously complained of having “trouble breathing.”
O’Hara had a unique place in Saturday Night Live’s history even though she was never officially a cast member. Due to her success on Canada’s groundbreaking sketch show SCTV, SNL executive producer Dick Ebersol attempted to hire O’Hara in early 1981 when he took over the show.
While there were stories about O’Hara being scared off by notoriously volatile SNL head writer Michael O’Donoghue, she dismissed those rumors as “B.S.” during a 2024 interview with People. Instead, O’Hara revealed that she decided against taking a job at SNL out of loyalty to SCTV.
“Our producer would get a deal with a network, and we’d have a show for a season or two, and then that deal would go away. There’d be a break, then we’d do the show again,” she explained. “I got asked to be on Saturday Night Live. And of course I said yes. Who doesn’t want to do that?’”
However, O’Hara ultimately backed out of a potential place in the Saturday Night Live season 6 cast alongside Eddie Murphy when SCTV was picked up for another season.
“Yeah, not cool to take a job and leave it. You know what I mean?” she admitted, before adding, “It all worked out the way it was supposed to.”
That decision certainly worked out for O’Hara because she won her first Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 1982 for her work on SCTV. (O’Hara received her second Emmy nearly 40 years later, this time in the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series category for Schitt’s Creek.)
O’Hara did eventually host Saturday Night Live on two occasions, first in April 1991 and then again on Halloween night in 1992.
She forged a legacy as one of Canada’s most successful comedy exports with starring roles in Home Alone, Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Best in Show. In 2025, she received Emmy nominations in both drama and comedy categories for her work on The Last of Us and The Studio, respectively.
O’Hara was reportedly filming the second season of Apple TV+’s The Studio until shortly before her death.
“Really don’t know what to say,” The Studio cocreator Seth Rogen admitted via Instagram on Friday. “I told O’Hara when I first met her I thought she was the funniest person I’d ever had the pleasure of watching on screen. Home Alone was the movie that made me want to make movies.”
Rogen, 43, went on, “Getting to work with her was a true honour. She was hysterical, kind, intuitive, generous… she made me want to make our show good enough to be worthy of her presence in it. This is just devastating. We’re all lucky we got to live in a world with her in it.”
Many of O’Hara’s contemporaries and fans — including The Last of Us costar Pedro Pascal, Home Alone castmate Macaulay Culkin, comedian Amy Schumer and late-night host Andy Cohen — have all shared their own remembrances of the comedy icon since news broke of her death on Friday.
Saturday Night Live airs on NBC Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET.
