“Kevin!” With that panicked exclamation, delivered in wide-eyed, straight-to-camera close-up in the festive comedy Home Alone (1990), the actor Catherine O’Hara, who has died aged 71 after a short illness, cemented her place as one of cinema’s most neglectful screen parents.
After inadvertently leaving her young son (played by Macaulay Culkin) behind in Chicago at the mercy of burglars while the rest of the McCallister family flies to Paris for Christmas, O’Hara’s character, Kate, spends the film struggling to get back to him. On her return trip, she accepts a lift from a polka band. Its leader is played by John Candy, one of O’Hara’s stablemates – along with Martin Short, Eugene Levy and Gilda Radner – from her early days in Toronto’s improvisational comedy troupe Second City.
