17:50Classic TV · 1985Home Alone Cast Then and Now: Who's Still Alive?
Episode: Home Alone Cast (1990): Cast Then & Now 2026 - What Happened to Them
From Hollywood Legends Era · 17 min ·
About the Home Alone Cast Then and Now
The Home Alone cast then and now is a story that spans more than three decades of Christmas viewing. The film opened in November 1990, written and produced by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus, and it earned about $476 million worldwide.
Its premise still makes parents wince. A big family rushes off to Paris for the holidays and leaves eight-year-old Kevin McCallister behind, and Kevin ends up defending the house from two bumbling burglars.
Since then, the cast has seen awards, quiet new lives and real losses. Here is what became of them.
Who Played the McCallister Family?
Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister
Macaulay Culkin was ten when Home Alone was released, and it made him the most famous child in the world. His pay rose from $110,000 for the first film to $4.5 million for Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992).
Life at home was much harder. Culkin has described his father, Kit, as violent toward him and the family, and as a teenager he went to court to remove his parents' control over his trust fund. He says they have not been in contact for more than 30 years.
In December 2008 his older sister, Dakota, was struck by a car in Los Angeles and died the next day. When Culkin and actress Brenda Song welcomed their first son in 2021, they named him Dakota. A second son followed in 2022.
Culkin received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in December 2023. He is 46 and still acting, including a role in the second season of Fallout.
Catherine O'Hara as Kate McCallister
Catherine O'Hara played Kate, the mother who realizes on the plane that her son is not with them. Her cry of "Kevin!" became one of the film's best-known moments.
She began at Toronto's Second City in 1974, alongside friends such as John Candy and Eugene Levy, and won an Emmy for her writing on SCTV. Decades later she won another Emmy as Moira Rose on Schitt's Creek, and in 2025 she was nominated again for The Studio.
Catherine O'Hara died on January 30, 2026, at age 71. Her death certificate listed a pulmonary embolism, with rectal cancer as the underlying cause. She was survived by her husband, production designer Bo Welch, whom she married in 1992, and their sons, Matthew and Luke.
Macaulay Culkin began his tribute simply: "Mama. I thought we had time." At the Emmys in September 2026, he joined her Schitt's Creek co-stars Annie Murphy and Dan Levy to honor her on stage.
John Heard as Peter McCallister
John Heard played Peter, Kevin's father, in both films. He was a respected dramatic actor, known for Cutter's Way (1981) and for playing Tom Hanks's office rival in Big (1988). His role as a troubled detective on The Sopranos earned him a 1999 Emmy nomination.
One of his sons died in December 2016 at age 22. Seven months later, on July 21, 2017, Heard was found dead in a Palo Alto, California, hotel, where he was recovering from minor back surgery. He was 71, and his death was attributed to heart disease.
Kieran Culkin as Fuller McCallister
Kieran Culkin was seven when he played Fuller, the little cousin who is warned to go easy on the Pepsi.
He kept working steadily for years, then broke through as Roman Roy on HBO's Succession. In January 2024 he won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. In March 2025 he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for A Real Pain. He is 44.
Hillary Wolf as Megan McCallister
Hillary Wolf played Megan, Kevin's older sister, in both Home Alone films. She then found a very different calling: judo.
In 1994 she won the junior world championship in Cairo, which the JudoInside database records as a first for an American. She competed for the United States at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and the 2000 Games in Sydney. She married Chris Saba in 2002 and has kept a quiet life away from Hollywood. She is 49.
Devin Ratray as Buzz McCallister
Devin Ratray played Buzz, Kevin's teasing older brother, and returned to the role in Home Sweet Home Alone (2021). He also had a supporting part in Alexander Payne's Nebraska (2013).
His story later took a serious turn. In February 2024 he pleaded guilty in Oklahoma to domestic assault charges, including a felony count of strangulation, from a December 2021 incident at an Oklahoma City hotel. He received probation and was ordered into an intervention program. His most recent screen credits date from 2022. He is 49.
Angela Goethals as Linnie McCallister
Angela Goethals played Linnie, one of Kevin's older sisters. She is a great-great-granddaughter of George Washington Goethals, chief engineer of the Panama Canal.
She did not return for the sequel. At 14 she won an Obie Award for her off-Broadway performance in The Good Times Are Killing Me. She appeared in Jerry Maguire (1996), graduated from Vassar College in 1999 with a degree in French, and later had a recurring role on 24. Her most recent credit is a 2018 short film. She is 49.
Who Played the Wet Bandits and the Neighbors?
Joe Pesci as Harry Lyme
Joe Pesci played Harry, the shorter half of the Wet Bandits. A few months after Home Alone opened, he won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for GoodFellas, playing a far more frightening criminal.
For a family film, he traded real swearing for mumbled "cartoon cursing" that many viewers compared to Yosemite Sam. Pesci largely stepped back from acting in 1999, then returned for The Irishman (2019), earning another Oscar nomination. He is 83.
Daniel Stern as Marv Murchins
Daniel Stern played Marv, the taller Wet Bandit, the one with the tarantula on his face. At the same time, TV audiences knew his voice as the grown-up Kevin Arnold, narrator of The Wonder Years from 1988 to 1993.
In later years he turned to farming and art in California, raising cattle and citrus and creating bronze sculptures for public spaces. In 2024 he published a memoir, Home and Alone. His son Henry Stern serves in the California State Senate. Daniel Stern is 69.
Roberts Blossom as Old Man Marley
Roberts Blossom played Old Man Marley, the neighbor the children feared, who turns out to be lonely and kind. His Christmas Eve talk with Kevin in church is one of the film's most moving scenes.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1924, he attended Harvard for a year before joining the Army and serving in Europe during World War II. He won three Obie Awards for stage work. On screen, he once played a killer based on Ed Gein in the 1974 horror film Deranged.
After retiring in the late 1990s, he moved to Berkeley and devoted himself to writing poetry. Roberts Blossom died on July 8, 2011, at age 87.
John Candy as Gus Polinski
John Candy appears only briefly, as Gus Polinski, the polka bandleader who offers Kate a ride home to Chicago with his band. Chris Columbus has said Candy worked on the film for just one day and improvised much of his material. He did it as a favor to John Hughes and was reportedly paid only $414.
Candy's own father died of heart disease on John's fifth birthday, at just 35. On March 4, 1994, while filming Wagons East in Durango, Mexico, he died in his sleep of a suspected heart attack. He was 43. Catherine O'Hara, his friend since their Second City days, gave the eulogy at a memorial in Toronto.
Why Home Alone Still Brings Families Together
Home Alone is a movie about a family that forgets a child and then races to get back to him. Under the paint cans and booby traps, it is about the people we want around us at Christmas.
The cast's lives after 1990 took very different roads, from Oscar stages and judo mats to quiet farms and painful goodbyes. But the film they made together still airs every holiday season.
Who in the McCallister house do you remember best, and did watching Home Alone become a holiday tradition in your family?
Sources and Further Reading
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