Actress Catherine O’Hara died from pulmonary embolism, death certificate says

Catherine O’Hara, the Canadian-American film and television actress best known for her roles in Schitt’s Creek, Home Alone and Beetlejuice, died of a pulmonary embolism with an underlying cause of rectal cancer, according to a death certificate that was released Feb 9.

O’Hara

died Jan 30 at age 71 at Saint John’s Health Center

, a hospital in Santa Monica, California. No other underlying causes of death were listed on the certificate, which said she had been cremated.

At the time of O’Hara’s death, Creative Artists Agency, which had represented her, said she had been briefly ill.

O’Hara starred in dozens of films and television shows over a five-decade career. She won an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actor’s Guild Award for her role as the reality-challenged Moira Rose opposite Eugene Levy in the offbeat television comedy Schitt’s Creek.

Years earlier, in 1982, she won a prime-time Emmy for writing on the Canadian sketch-comedy show SCTV.

O’Hara’s best-known silver-screen roles were in the Home Alone films from the early 1990s, in which she played a stressed-out matriarch trying to shepherd her family on vacation only to leave behind her youngest child, Kevin, played by Macaulay Culkin. Her earsplitting cry of “KEVIN!” quickly took its place in film history.

Her death in January prompted a flood of tributes from across Hollywood.

“Mama. I thought we had time. I wanted more,” Culkin wrote on social media, referring to his onscreen relationship with O’Hara. Comic actor Martin Short, performing the night of O’Hara’s death in Austin, Texas, called her “the greatest, most brilliant, kindest, sweetest angel that any of us worked with”. NYTIMES