Long after the cameras stopped rolling, the late icon’s relationships with the actors who played her children clearly endured. Their emotional reflections reveal just how deeply she remains woven into their lives off-screen.

For decades, Catherine O’Hara played unforgettable mothers, including two women whose children became permanently woven into pop culture. At the 2026 Emmys, three of those on-screen kids stood together, and one seemingly simple word turned their tribute into something much more personal.

The emotional moment brought Macaulay Culkin, Annie Murphy, and Dan Levy onto the same stage to remember O’Hara, who died at her Los Angeles home on January 30, 2026, following a brief illness, according to Variety. She was 71.

O’Hara’s remarkable career stretched across five decades, but for millions of viewers, some of her most beloved work involved playing a mother.

She was the frantic but fiercely determined Kate McCallister opposite Culkin in “Home Alone” and “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.” Years later, she reinvented television motherhood as the gloriously eccentric Moira Rose alongside Levy and Murphy on “Schitt’s Creek.” And at the Emmys, those two very different fictional families suddenly collided.

Catherine O’Hara’s On-Screen Children Stand Together
As the trio stepped onto the stage, their appearances immediately highlighted just how much time had passed since the roles that connected them to O’Hara.

Culkin appeared in a light cream suit with a coordinating shirt, his hair cropped short and a neatly trimmed beard framing his face. Standing beside him, Murphy wore her dark hair swept into a sleek high bun and a floor-length black, semi-sheer dress covered in intricate sparkling detailing.

Levy completed the trio in an elegant black double-breasted suit, paired with a black tie, glasses, and a large floral detail on his lapel.

Together, they looked worlds removed from the younger characters audiences first associated with O’Hara, but what followed made it clear that their connection to her had never simply disappeared when the cameras stopped rolling.

Culkin spoke first. During the Emmys tribute, he opened with a knowing reference to the role that connected him and O’Hara more than three decades earlier.

“Catherine O’Hara. We remember her as the forgetful mother, right?” he began. Then came the turn. “But we’ll never forget about her.”

The line drew directly from one of the most famous running jokes in “Home Alone”: Kate McCallister accidentally leaving Kevin behind not once, but twice.

Yet Culkin quickly moved away from the joke, and toward the woman he remembered when there were no scripts involved.

Culkin Reveals the Word He Associates with O’Hara
“There are all kinds of words I could use to describe Catherine,” Culkin said. “She was encouraging, she was warm, she was funny.” Then, after decades of publicly referring to O’Hara as his movie mother, Culkin revealed the word that still came to him first.

“But the word that I think of is mama.” The moment became even more poignant as he explained exactly what he meant.

“She wasn’t just a wife and mother to Beau and Matthew and Luke,” he continued. “She was my mom. She was our mama.”