LOS ANGELES, Aug 14 (Reuters) – U.S. actor Anne Heche was taken off life support on Sunday, nine days after she was seriously injured in a car crash, as a support person was found to be receiving her donated organs, a spokesman said.
Heche, 53, had been legally dead as of Friday, though still with a beating heart, and was kept on life support to preserve her organs so they could be donated, her representatives said.
“Anne Heche has been peacefully taken off life support,”
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spokeswoman Holly Baird said in a statement.
Heche’s Mini Cooper went out of control, plowed into a house and burst into flames on August 5, prompting an agonizing hospital stay with increasingly grim messages from his family and representatives.
On Friday, one of her two sons, 19-year-old Homer Laffoon, released a statement saying, “My brother Atlas and I lost our mother.”
Heche, who starred in the films “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag The Dog” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” struggled for decades with the aftermath of a troubled childhood and was part of a same-sex innovator in the 1990s.
Winner of a 1991 Daytime Emmy Award for her roles as identical twin sisters on the NBC soap opera “Another World,” Heche starred in the 1998 adventure comedy “Six Days Seven Nights” with Harrison Ford and acted alongside Demi Moore and Cher in the HBO TV Movie “If These Walls Could Talk.”
He became one half of Hollywood’s most famous gay couple when he dated comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres. Against his studio’s wishes, Heche went public at the 1997 red carpet premiere for the disaster movie “Volcano,” bringing DeGeneres as his date.
The couple were together for more than three years before Heche ended the relationship.
In an interview with entertainment website Page Six in October 2021, Heche said he was “blacklisted” from Hollywood because of his relationship with DeGeneres. “I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years. I got fired from a $10 million photo deal and didn’t see the light of day on a studio picture.”
In 2001, she married Coleman Laffoon, a cameraman. After the couple divorced, Heche began a long-term relationship with actor James Tupper that ended in 2018.
Anne Celeste Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio on May 25, 1969 and was the youngest of five children. At age 13, he was shocked by his father’s death from AIDS and the revelation that he had had secret gay relationships.
“I was in complete denial until the day she died,” Heche told CNN’s Larry King in 2001. She said in 1998 that her death taught her that the most important thing in life is to tell the truth.
His brother, Nathan, died three months after his father in a car accident.
Heche said her father raped her as a child, causing her mental health problems for decades afterward, including frequent fantasies that she was from another planet.
“I’m not crazy,” Heche told ABC News in 2001 at the release of his book, “Call Me Crazy: A Memoir.”
“But it’s a crazy life. I grew up in a crazy family and it took me 31 years to get the crazy out of me.”
Heche’s mother, Nancy, denied her daughter’s claim that she knew about the sexual abuse, calling it “lies and blasphemy” and her sister Abigail has said she believes the “memories about our father are not true.” He said that Anne Heche had cast doubt on his own memories of that time.
Later in his career, Heche acted as a senior member of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the NBC television series “The Brave” and appeared on the competition show “Dancing With The Stars” in late 2020.
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Reporting Lisa Richwine; Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta and Alistair Bell; Editing by Kim Coghill, Robert Birsel
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