THE ANGELS –
Anne Heche, the Emmy-winning film and television actor whose dramatic rise in Hollywood in the 1990s and stellar career contrasted with personal episodes of turmoil, has died of injuries sustained in an accident by car She was 53 years old.
Heche “peacefully went off life support,” spokeswoman Holly Baird said in a statement Sunday night.
Heche had been on life support at a Los Angeles burn center after suffering a “severe anoxic brain injury,” caused by a lack of oxygen, when his car crashed into a house on Aug. 5, according to a statement released Thursday by a representative on August 5. on behalf of his family and friends.
She was declared brain dead on Friday but remained on life support in case her organs could be donated, an assessment that took nine days. In the US, most organ transplants are done after this determination.
An Ohio native whose family moved across the country, Heche suffered from an abusive and tragic childhood, which helped push her into acting as a way to escape her own life. She showed enough early promise to be offered professional work in high school and first landed on the NBC soap opera “Another World” from 1987 to 1991, winning a Daytime Emmy Award for her role as the twins Marley and Vicky Hudson, who show her sustained injuries that anticipated Heche’s: Vicky is in a coma for months after a car accident.
In the late 1990s, Heche was one of Hollywood’s most popular actors, a fixture on magazine covers and in big-budget movies. In 1997 alone, she starred opposite Johnny Depp as his wife in “Donnie Brasco” and Tommy Lee Jones in “Volcano” and was part of the cast of the original “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
The following year, she starred with Ford in “Six Days, Seven Nights” and appeared with Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix in “Return to Paradise.” She also played one of cinema’s most famous murder victims, Marion Crane of “Psycho,” in Gus Van Sant’s remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic, and starred in the indie favorite “Walking and Talking.”
Around the same time, her personal life led her to even greater fame, and both personal and professional upheaval. He met Ellen DeGeneres at the 1997 Vanity Fair Oscar Party, fell in love and began a 3-year relationship that made them one of Hollywood’s first openly gay couples. But Heche later said her career was damaged by an industry wary of casting her in leading roles. He would recall advisers who objected to his decision to have DeGeneres accompany him to the “Volcano” premiere.
“They tapped us on the shoulder, put us in their limo in the third act and told us they couldn’t take pictures of us for the press,” Heche said in 2018 on the Irish Goodbye podcast.
After she and DeGeneres split, Heche had a public meltdown and would speak candidly about her mental health struggles.
Heche’s delicately elven gaze belied her strength on screen. When she won the National Board of Review’s best supporting actress award in 1997, the board cited the one-two punch of “Donnie Brasco” and the political satire “Wag the Dog,” in which Heche portray a cynical White House aide and he did his. against the great cinema Robert De Niro.
Heche also effectively invoked his apparent fragility. In 2002 she starred on Broadway in the play “Proof” as a woman who fears losing her mind just like her father, a brilliant math teacher. An Associated Press review praised her “touching, vulnerable but funny performance, especially when Catherine mocks suspicions about her mental stability.”
In the fall of 2000, shortly after her breakup with DeGeneres, Heche was hospitalized after knocking on a stranger’s door in a rural area near Fresno, California. Authorities said she appeared shaken and disoriented and spoke incoherently to residents.
In a memoir published the following year, “Call Me Crazy,” Heche spoke of his lifelong battles. During a 2001 interview with television reporter Barbara Walters, Heche recounted in painful detail the alleged sexual abuse by her father, Donald Heche, who claimed to be devoutly religious and died in 1983 of complications from AIDS. Heche described his suffering as so extreme that he developed a separate personality and imagined himself descended from another planet.
In the last days of his life, Heche said, he learned that he was secretly gay and believed that his inability to live honestly fueled his anger and harmful behavior. Not only did his father die, but his brother Nathan, one of his four siblings, died in a car accident.
“I’m not crazy. But it’s a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took me 31 years to get the crazy out of me,” Heche told Walters. In an effort to escape the past, “I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did everything I could to get the shame out of my life.”
Heche dated Steve Martin in the 1990s and is believed to have inspired the aspiring but ambitious child actor played by Heather Graham in his Hollywood spoof “Bowfinger.” She later had a son with camera operator Coleman Laffoon, whom she was married to from 2001 to 2009. She had another son during a relationship with actor James Tupper, her co-star in the TV series “Men In Trees”.
Heche worked steadily in smaller films, on Broadway, and in television shows over the past two decades. He recently had recurring roles on the network series “Chicago PD” and “All Rise,” and in 2020 was a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars.”