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Erica Jean

At 33, Catherine O’Hara wasn’t so different from the average teenage girl who had just fallen for her crush.
“It was like high school. ‘Oh, he talked to me today! He talked to me for three minutes! He talked to me for seven minutes!’” O’Hara, who has just turned 71, joked during a 2020 Q&A with Tiff.
His 32-year marriage to O’Hara aside, Bo Welch, 73, is a critically acclaimed production designer, known particularly for his work on The Color Purple and Men in Black. Here’s a closer look at his life and work.
Bo Welch studied architecture

Born in 1951 in Pennsylvania, Welch didn’t set out to become a production designer.
As a boy he dreamed of designing buildings, which led him to study architecture at the University of Arizona. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles to start his career as an architect but quickly became disillusioned with the industry’s realities.
“It should serve people and be the framework for a more cohesive kind of country, world, state and town,” Welch told The New York Times in 1992. “But everything in the fabric of our physical world works to alienate and separate people from each other.”
This dissatisfaction prompted him to explore production design, where he could still apply the sense and taste he’d developed as an architect, he told the newspaper. After badgering a set designer at Universal, he eventually landed a position at the studio.
What began with designing and building a door for a television show quickly expanded into bigger opportunities, including art-direction roles on films like Swing Shift and The Color Purple, which brought him the first of four Oscar nominations. But it was his first big appointment that really opened doors for his career.
Despite Welch’s having no prior experience as a production designer, director Joel Schumacher took a chance on him for The Lost Boys, a stylised vampire film.

His work caught the eye of Tim Burton, who was preparing to direct Beetlejuice.
“They were looking for a production designer. I got an interview with them and begged for the job because Beetlejuice blew my mind,” Welch recalled in The New York Times.
Soon, he was working alongside Burton to create a set that matched the script’s vision of an “interior afterlife”.
“We tried to think of the afterlife and sort of hell and purgatory in the most mundane, matter-of-fact way we could,” Welch added. “Perhaps the afterlife wasn’t this fantastically visual, stormy, cloudy, lightning, esoteric place. Maybe it was like waiting at the unemployment office.”
They got together thanks to Tim Burton

Working on Beetlejuice didn’t just open Welch’s eyes to the endless possibilities of set design – it also introduced him to O’Hara, who starred as Delia Deetz in the film.
“I actually wrote in a diary, ‘We’re supposed to get married someday, so I wish he would ask me out,’” O’Hara confessed to Elle Canada last year.
But despite their frequent conversations Welch never made a move. Fed up, O’Hara coaxed Tim Burton to help by convincing Welch to ask her out, as noted by People.
It worked. With Burton’s encouragement, Welch invited O’Hara to join the film’s art department outing to a swap meet. And while O’Hara didn’t exactly see it as a romantic gesture, it was a step in the right direction.
The couple began dating when filming wrapped and after four years together they married, in 1992. They now have two sons, Matthew and Luke, both of whom have followed their father into behind-the-scenes work in the entertainment industry.


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Fame and celebrity

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Meet actress Catherine O’Hara’s production designer husband, Bo Welch. Photo: Getty Images

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Entertainment

Originally an architect, Welch scored his big break in set design working on Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys – but it was meeting O’Hara on the set of Beetlejuice that truly changed his life


Originally an architect, Welch scored his big break in set design working on Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys – but it was meeting O’Hara on the set of Beetlejuice that truly changed his life.
