Catherine O’Hara reflects on 25 years since Home Alone,
25 years after movie’s release, Catherine O’Hara grateful to be part of Christmas ‘ritual’ for nostalgic film lovers
“How could she forget her kid?” Catherine O’Hara has heard that plenty of times from Home Alone fans over the 25 years since the debut of the Christmas comedy about a scrappy 8-year-old, played by Macaulay Culkin, who aggressively defends his Winnetka, Illinois home from dim-witted burglars.
“I know it’s possible,” O’Hara told the Star from California recently. “My mom and dad . . . had seven kids and they once moved from one house to another and left my sister,” she said with a laugh, explaining future singer-actress Mary Margaret O’Hara was temporarily forgotten in the stress of a moving day in Toronto.
Home Alone opened Nov. 16, 1990 and consistently ranks among favourite sea- sonal flicks. It also led the box office that year and has made more than $476 million worldwide.
“I love running into all the young people who were kids at the time and grew up with that movie and watch it every holiday. I’m grateful to be part of someone’s Christmas ritual,” said O’Hara, who played Kevin’s mom, Kate.
Written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus, the movie had pintsized wisecracker Kevin McCallister (Culkin) banished to the attic for bratty behaviour the night before a family trip to Paris. The next morning, he’s accidentally left behind in the chaotic rush to get to the airport.
When burglars Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) want to include Kevin’s house in their Christmas crime spree, the kid fights back in hilarious slapstick ways.
Meanwhile, Kate panics when she realizes Kevin was left behind, insisting on getting home to her youngest by whatever means.
Stranded on the road, she gets a lift from the late John Candy as the bighearted polka king of the Midwest, Gus Polinski.
“Which he would do in real life,” said O’Hara of her longtime friend and SCTV castmate. “He was what you’d hope he would be when you’d meet him. He’d never let anyone down.”
While the star of For Your Consideration, Beetlejuice and CBC TV’s Schitt’s Creek said making Home Alone was “great fun, a lovely experience . . . I don’t think anyone knew it would be the success it was.”
Certainly not O’Hara, who had no inkling Home Alone was destined to become a classic “and that we’d still be talking about it 25 years later.”
While Kevin’s signature movie moment is his double face-palm shriek after his first encounter with aftershave, Kate gets her onscreen scream in too, hollering “Kevin!” when she realizes they left their youngest at home.
People still come up to O’Hara with a strange request. “Over the years I’ve met a lot of guys whose name is Kevin. They’ll say, ‘Will you yell my name?’ ”
As for Culkin, who is now 35, “he was just a lovely little boy . . . He was just a regular little kid who would rather be goofing off than working. He definitely did his job.”
O’Hara said Culkin’s serious adultlike delivery in some scenes — and in 1989 comedy Uncle Buck where he interrogates Candy — reminded her of George (Foghorn) Winslow, the deadpan kid star who held his own in scenes with Marilyn Monroe in 1953 comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
“Macaulay’s delivery was like that,” said O’Hara. “I don’t know if it was Chris Columbus getting that out of him, but it was that sweet, old-fashioned kind of straight delivery.”
While the shoot was fun, O’Hara said the scene where Kate sends Kevin up to the attic and he angrily replies he hopes he never sees any of them again gave her trouble.
“I say to him, I don’t know the line exactly, but it’s something like, ‘You’d be awfully sorry if you woke up and your family was gone.’ And I was not a mother at the time and thought no mother would say this horrible thing,” O’Hara recalled laughing.
“I remember arguing with Chris Columbus about it and he said to me, ‘Ah, it’s pretty important you say this.’ I thought, ‘Can’t I be nicer about this? This is too mean.’ I wasn’t a mother. Now I know. I’m capable of saying much more horrific things to my sons.”
While O’Hara names Holiday Inn, A Christmas Carol (starring Alastair Sim) and It’s a Wonderful Life among her favourite seasonal movies, “it’s an honour, really” that so many people put Home Alone in their Top 10 lists.
“It seems to mean so much to so many people because they grew up with it,” O’Hara observed, adding “the stuff you loved as a kid” always seems to stay with us.
“At the time, it was a thrill for kids to see another kid overcome so much and be the hero,” she said. “And not only survive but be the hero, and be so smart and creative and get reunited with family.” Home Alone screens at 94 Cineplex theatres across Canada on Nov. 21 as part of the chain’s Family Favourites series. Catch it again Dec. 20 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Catherine O’Hara still gets requests from kids named Kevin to shout their name