O’Hara died on Friday, Jan. 30, at age 71 after a “brief illness,” a rep confirmed to PEOPLE

Catherine O’Hara; Catherine O’Hara, husband Bo Welch and family during ‘The Cat In The Hat’ World Premiere.Credit : Emma McIntyre/Getty; SGranitz/WireImage

Catherine O’Hara cherished being a mother above all else.

The Emmy-winning actress died on Friday, Jan. 30, after a brief illness, her rep confirmed to PEOPLE. She was 71.

Back in Feb. 2024, O’Hara spoke candidly about the role she most wanted to be remembered for in an interview with TMZ at LAX.

The late actress played a mother onscreen in the 1990 film Home Alone and the CBC sitcom Schitt’s Creek, while she and her husband Bo Welch shared two sons Matthew and Luke. In a resurfaced clip from her TMZ interview, O’Hara made it clear that her proudest work was being the “mother of my children.”

As the interviewer clarified that he was referring to her acting, she quipped while gesturing to her husband, “His wife.”

Catherine O’Hara, Matthew Welch, and Bo Welch attend an event at the Garage Gallery in West Hollywood, California, on October 29, 1994.Ted Dayton/WWD/Penske Media/Getty

O’Hara largely kept her family out of the spotlight prior to her death. She tried her best to prioritize quality time with her family over her career throughout the boys’ childhoods.

“I really didn’t work much,” she told Julia Louis-Dreyfus during an October 2024 episode of her Wiser Than Me podcast. “And I’d work in town. I remember the first offer I got to work, they were both…probably about 5 and 8, maybe 6 and 9. And I got offered a job in London.”

Noting that she relied on the help of a “great nanny” during the six weeks she spent on the job, O’Hara emphasized that she wouldn’t want to spend any more than a few weeks away from her kids.

Bo Welch and Catherine O’Hara attend the 2025 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.Karwai Tang/WireImage

“In deciding what work I might get involved in for my whole working life, my family’s always come first,” she explained at the time. “I have two sons, and when they were babies, I thought, ‘What’s the point?’ What’s the point in having children if I’m not going to be with them, so that was always number one consideration and always will be.”

As Matthew and Luke got older, however, they began to follow in their mother’s footsteps. While O’hara revealed in a 2020 interview with Vanity Fair that both of her sons worked on Schitt’s Creek — one as a set dresser and the other in set construction — she also revealed during a February 2024 appearance on Watch What Happens Live that one of her sons was involved in HBO Max’s The Last of Us.

Even before they began dabbling in show business, O’Hara could immediately tell that they had also inherited her sense of humor.

“They’re very funny, and we encourage it,” she gushed to the Toronto Star in 2007. “The older one does Warners cartoon bits, really old-fashioned, cheap-a– funny vaudeville stuff. And the little one does word play.”

“I’m proud to say, we all make each other laugh. In my home, growing up,” she added. “I learned that from my parents. They made each other laugh to the end, God bless ‘em. How great is that?”