Home Alone Actors You May Not Know Passed Away

There is often a melancholy feeling to Christmas celebrations and traditions; underneath the lights and tinsel is an understanding that another year has passed, and perhaps those friends and family we celebrated with in the past are no longer with us. 

Even high-concept family comedies like the 1990 holiday classic "Home Alone" and its sequels have a heartfelt nostalgia at their core. Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) wishes for his family to disappear at Christmas, and as far he understands the next morning, that's exactly what happens. For Kevin, it's a short-lived dream come true, as he soon realizes how much he loves and misses his parents and older siblings. For his parents (John Heard and Catherine O'Hara), it's their worst nightmare come to life, but one with a happy ending; their reunion at the end of the film underlines how important it is to value family, as we never know when we might not see them again.

For many families, watching "Home Alone" is itself a holiday tradition; those who were children when the first film came out might now have children of their own to delight in Kevin's slapstick battles against the incompetent Wet Bandits (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). The films' actors become family friends of a sort who visit once a year; their 1990 selves are preserved like insects in ember, but in real life all of them have aged, and some are no longer with us. Here is a list of "Home Alone" actors you may not know have passed away.

Marian Seldes appears in 1997's "Home Alone 3" as Mrs. Hess, the grumpy neighbor of our new hero Alex (Alex D. Linz) who, just like Old Man Marley and the Pigeon Lady before her, seems scary at first but concludes the movie as a new friend. 

Mrs. Hess kicks the film's needlessly complicated plot into motion by picking up the wrong shopping bag at the San Francisco airport. Instead of a loaf of sourdough bread, she now has a remote control car toy, which she gives to Alex as payment for shoveling her driveway badly. Little do they know, however, that the toy contains a state-of-the-art microchip bound for North Korea, and a group of bumbling international smugglers is breaking into neighborhood houses looking for it.

Seldes' career on screen spanned seven decades and over one hundred film and television roles. Like many theatre actors, she was a mainstay on television during its golden age, making multiple appearances on "General Electric Theatre," "Kraft Theatre," "Omnibus," and more. In later years she would be recognizable to audiences as the mother of Murphy Brown and of Mr. Big on "Sex in the City." Her main love, however, was the stage. Seldes was nominated for five Tony awards across her career, winning for Edward Albee's play "A Delicate Balance" in 1967 and receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. She was a longtime educator at Julliard and Fordham University in New York, counting Robin Williams, Laura Linney, Viola Davis, and more as pupils. Seldes died in 2011 at age 86.

If you happened to be an elementary school student in 1990 or 1991, there is a solid chance that you or someone you know curled their lip and grunted "Keep the change, ya filthy animal!" in response to something or other, or perhaps for no reason at all. One of the most well-remembered quotes from "Home Alone" comes from character actor Ralph Foody as Johnny, the gangster glimpsed in the 1930s B-movie parody "Angels with Filthy Souls" — which apparently a lot of people (including Seth Rogen) thought was a real film. Foody and his trigger-happy alter ego appeared in "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" as well, when Kevin watches the sequel "Angels with Even Filthier Souls."

The tough-talking Chicago actor was a natural at playing both cops and crooks, appearing in "The Blues Brothers" as a police dispatcher and the short-lived 1985 police drama "Lady Blue" opposite Jamie Rose and Danny Aiello. He also worked with "Home Alone" writer John Hughes in the 1991 dramedy "Curly Sue." After "Home Alone 2," Foody retired with his wife Jan to Lexington, Kentucky; he died from cancer in 1999.

Actor Bill Erwin plays Irene's husband Ed, who is impatient to board the plane and immune to Kate's bribes ("She's got her own earrings, a whole shoebox full of them — dangly ones!"). It is only after Kate admits how desperate she is to get on the plane that Ed relents. It is a brief but pivotal scene, as it allows O'Hara, Bird, and Erwin to play both the comedy and drama of the situation.

Born in Texas, Erwin served in World War II and made a brief appearance as a soldier in the 1941 Phil Silvers/Jimmy Durante comedy "You're In the Army Now." After attending the University of Texas, Erwin made the move to Hollywood and began appearing in roles on television and the stage, including "Wagon Train," "The Danny Thomas Show," and "I Love Lucy." 

Like his onscreen wife Billie Bird, Erwin's most recognizable roles came later in life. In 1980 he starred alongside Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour in the time travel romance "Somewhere in Time," and was a frequent guest at annual celebrations of the film hosted at the Mackinac Island hotel where it was filmed. On stage he wrote and performed in the solo show "Twisted Twain," where he played Mark Twain's long lost 160-year-old brother. A guest appearance on "Seinfeld" in 1992 earned him an Emmy nomination, and he booked appearances on "The Drew Carey Show," "Monk," and "My Name is Earl" in the years before his death. Erwin was also a published cartoonist and maintained a longtime friendship with sci-fi author Ray Bradbury. He died in December 2010 at age 96.

So much of the heart in the first two "Home Alone" films is in the relationship between Kevin and his mother that it can be easy to forget that he has a father too — Peter, played by actor John Heard. It's never clear exactly what Peter does for a living to afford such a large home in suburban Winnetka and international flights for the extended family (the film's novelization mentions that he is a businessman, but delves no further into what that might mean), but he appears to be a caring and attentive dad to Kevin and his four other kids, even if he misses out on the big emotional moments that mother and son share.

Heard got his start on stage in the 1970s, appearing in off-Broadway and regional theatre productions such as the premiere of David Rabe's war drama "Streamers." It was a Shakespeare in the Park production of "Othello" that attracted the attention of director Ivan Passer, who cast Heard in the title role of the 1981 post-Vietnam drama "Cutter's Way," in which he (alongside Jeff Bridges) gave one of the all-time-great underseen performances of the era. 

Heard followed that up in collaborations with many of the best directors of the 1980s, including Paul Schrader in "Cat People," Martin Scorsese in "After Hours," and Penny Marshall in both "Big" and "Awakenings." He worked consistently throughout the 1990s and 2000s, often in smaller, less heralded roles; his best remembered role from this era was as Vin Makazian, the New Jersey detective on Tony Soprano's payroll on Season 1 of "The Sopranos." Heard died of cardiac arrest in 2017 at age 71.