Schitt’s Creek alum Dan Levy is paying tribute to his onscreen mom, Catherine O’Hara, two months after her death.
Levy, 42, was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday, March 31, and took a moment to remember O’Hara after host Jimmy Fallon told him he was “so sorry about the passing” of the actress.
“Listen, it’s like a collective loss, I think,” Levy said. “She was the greatest. She’s irreplaceable. I think the great comfort for me has just been to see how loved she was. The outpouring … everyone felt like they kind of knew her.”
Fallon, 51, praised O’Hara for being “one of the funniest comedians I’ve ever seen,” to which Levy responded that the actress was “unbelievably talented at improvising.”
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“One of the great, great, great queens,” he added.
O’Hara died in Los Angeles at age 71 on January 30 “following a brief illness,” her talent agency, the Creative Artists Agency, said in a statement to Us Weekly at the time.
In February, TMZ reported that O’Hara’s primary cause of death was a pulmonary embolism, citing an L.A. County Department of Public Health report. Rectal cancer was listed as the underlying cause, said the outlet.
O’Hara played Moira Rose in the hit sitcom Schitt’s Creek alongside Levy, who played her son David, Levy’s father, Eugene Levy, who played Rose family patriarch Johnny Rose, and Annie Murphy as Moira’s daughter Alexis. Levy cocreated the show with his father.
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“What a gift to have gotten to dance in the warm glow of Catherine O’Hara’s brilliance for all those years,” Levy shared in a January Instagram post reacting to news of O’Hara’s death. “Having spent over fifty years collaborating with my Dad, Catherine was extended family before she ever played my family. It’s hard to imagine a world without her in it. I will cherish every funny memory I was fortunate enough to make with her.”
“Words seem inadequate to express the loss I feel today. I had the honor of knowing and working with the great Catherine O’Hara for over fifty years,” Eugene Levy said in a statement to Us at the time. “From our beginnings on the Second City stage, to SCTV, to the movies we did with Chris Guest, to our six glorious years on Schitt’s Creek, I cherished our working relationship, but most of all our friendship.”
In March, O’Hara posthumously won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series for her role in Apple TV’s The Studio at SAG’s 2026 Actor Awards. The actress played movie studio boss-turned-producer Patty Leigh in the hit comedy, which marked one of her final roles before her death.
