Meet actress Catherine O’Hara’s beau of 32 years, Bo Welch, a production designer for films including Men in Black and Beetlejuice – and director Tim Burton helped set up their first date
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
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.
