How Catherine O'Hara Built a Life With Her Bébé, Husband Bo Welch

While to her, "dating is killer," the Toronto native was felled pretty quickly by Cupid's arrow when she met Welch on the set of 1988's Beetlejuice. 

"He was a production designer—designed all those wild sets," O'Hara, who tackled the role of Delia Deetz in the Tim Burton classic, explained during a 2024 appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show. "He was talking to me every day, it was like high school, he's just talking to me every day by our lockers. And then he never asked me out." 

So, when Welch left the Los Angeles set to work on location in Vermont, "I'm grousing to Tim Burton about how the production designer never asked me out," O'Hara continued. "And he said, 'Let me see what I can do.'" 

By the time she made her way to the Green Mountain State for the first day of exterior shooting, "He comes over, goes, 'Oh, the art department's going to a swap meet. You want to come with us?' It's like he'd been forced.'" 

Photo by John Shearer/WireImage

Though, admittedly, they did have one instance of reality being every bit as strange as fiction. 

"We were in New York once; I think it was New York," she recounted to People. "Bo and I got on the subway, we turned around, the doors are closing, and they weren’t on. I screamed and people screamed with me. Everybody joined in."

Fortunately, the doors reopened and her boys made it onto the train. Said O'Hara, "It makes me sick to think what could have happened."

But, no, that doesn't mean she gets secondary agita from watching her and Macaulay Culkin's 1990 holiday classic. 

In fact, as she joked to E! News in 2021, Home Alone earns a spot on her annual December viewing list alongside Holiday Inn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and It's a Wonderful Life. 

"Oh yeah," she quipped, "have to force my kids to watch that." 

As a family, they also committed to some of the traditions she had while growing up as the sixth of seven kids. 

"My dad would go outside the house and pretend to be Santa," she detailed to E!. "They would buy pajamas and my mom would go in the bedroom and say, 'Oh, Santa's here.'"

Gathered in front of the locked front door, they'd hear the muffled sounds of her dad as Kris Kringle "so we're insanely excited," she shared. "They were fresh pajamas that we'd get every Christmas. And then, of course, we couldn't sleep because Santa had already been to the house and was coming back later and we'd just be lying in bed, stiff bodies, our eyes open, out of our minds excited. So I did that for years with my kids. My husband and I, he'd go outside and ring the bell."

And that's just one magical vignette from a life positively bedeviled with happy moments. Keep reading to remember all of the ways O'Hara left her mark on the world.