Anne Heche, an actress who was as well-known for her roles in movies like “Six Days, Seven Nights” and “Donnie Brasco” as for her private life, which included a three-year romance with the comic Ellen DeGeneres, died on Sunday in Los Angeles, 9 days after she was in a devastating automobile accident there. She was 53.
Her loss of life was introduced late Sunday by a consultant, Holly Baird, who mentioned in an electronic mail that Ms. Heche had been “peacefully taken off life support.”
Ms. Heche was critically injured on Aug. 5 when a Mini Cooper she was driving crashed right into a two-story dwelling within the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, inflicting a hearth that took firefighters greater than an hour to extinguish. Ms. Heche, who was alone within the automobile, sustained burns and a extreme anoxic mind damage, attributable to an absence of oxygen to the mind.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police mentioned the division was persevering with to analyze whether or not drug use contributed to the accident.
An announcement launched by her publicist on behalf of her household on Thursday evening mentioned Ms. Heche had remained in a coma at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles.
“It has long been her choice to donate her organs, and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,” the assertion mentioned.
On Friday, a consultant mentioned Ms. Heche had been declared brain-dead on Thursday evening.
Ms. Heche was a cleaning soap opera star earlier than she turned recognized to film audiences. In the late Nineteen Eighties, quickly after she graduated from highschool, she joined the solid of the daytime drama “Another World,” the place she performed the great and evil twins Vicky Hudson and Marley Love. She gained a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991 for excellent youthful actress in a drama sequence.
By the mid-Nineteen Nineties, she was a rising star in Hollywood. She performed Catherine Keener’s finest buddy in “Walking and Talking” (1996); Johnny Depp’s spouse in “Donnie Brasco” (1997); a presidential aide within the political satire “Wag the Dog” (1997), with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro; and a vogue journal editor who crash-lands on a South Seas island in an airplane piloted by Harrison Ford in “Six Days, Seven Nights” (1998).
“Romantic comedies don’t get more formulaic than this bouncing-screwball valentine, but they don’t get much more delightful, either,” Rita Kempley wrote in her review of “Six Days, Seven Nights” in The Washington Post. “The same goes for Heche and Ford as squabbling opposites drawn together during this tropical adventure.”
Ms. Heche started a relationship with Ms. DeGeneres in 1997, at a time when same-sex relationships in Hollywood weren’t totally accepted. The relationship turned extensively recognized in April of that yr once they appeared, hand in hand, at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. A couple of days later, Ms. DeGeneres’s character on her sitcom, “Ellen,” got here out as homosexual.
Ms. Heche’s resolution to disclose that she was in a lesbian relationship, The New York Times wrote, “confronted Hollywood with a highly delicate problem: how to deal with a gay actress whose career has been built on playing heterosexual roles.”
Remembering Anne Heche (1969-2022)
The actress, who appeared in a number of common Hollywood movies and TV reveals, died on Aug. 14, after being critically injured in a automobile accident.
After that relationship ended, Ms. Heche married and later divorced a person, Coleman Laffoon, with whom she had a son, Homer. She additionally had a son, Atlas Heche Tupper, from her relationship with the actor James Tupper.
She is survived by her sons in addition to her mom, Nancy Heche, and her sister Abigail Heche. Her sister Susan Bergman died in 2006; one other sister, Cynthia, died as an toddler; and her brother, Nathan, died in 1983.
Ms. Heche informed The New York Post in 2021 that she had been “blacklisted” in Hollywood due to her relationship with Ms. DeGeneres.
“I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years,” she was quoted as saying. “I was fired from a $10 million picture deal and did not see the light of day in a studio picture.”
After she starred in “Six Days, Seven Nights” and in Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” as Marion Crane, the position initially performed by Janet Leigh, main roles in motion pictures largely gave strategy to visitor appearances on tv reveals like (*53*) and “Nip/Tuck.”
She additionally starred within the short-lived sitcom “Men in Trees,” had recurring roles on “Everwood” and “Chicago P.D.” and landed a featured half on the HBO sequence “Hung,” which starred Thomas Jane as a male prostitute.
She appeared on Broadway within the play “Proof” from 2002 till it closed in 2003, then within the 2004 revival of “Twentieth Century,” the 1932 comedy a couple of Broadway producer (Alec Baldwin) who, as a passenger on the Twentieth Century Limited practice, meets a former discovery, Lily Garland (Ms. Heche), who has turn out to be a Hollywood star. The position earned Ms. Heche a Tony Award nomination for finest efficiency by a number one actress in a play.
In his overview in The Times, Ben Brantley wrote, “Her posture melting between serpentine seductiveness and a street fighter’s aggressiveness, her voice shifting between supper-club velvet and dime-store vinyl, Ms. Heche summons an entire gallery of studio-made sirens from the Depression era: Jean Harlow, the pre-mummified Joan Crawford and, yes, Carole Lombard, who famously portrayed Lily in Howard Hawks’s screen version of ‘Twentieth Century.’”
In 2004, Ms. Heche was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for excellent supporting actress in a mini-series or film, for her efficiency in “Gracie’s Choice,” a TV movie about a youngster confronted with elevating her half siblings after their drug-addicted mom is shipped to jail.
She appeared most not too long ago within the movies “The Vanished” (2020), a psychological thriller, and “13 Minutes” (2021), which facilities on a twister, in addition to a number of episodes of the courtroom drama “All Rise.”
Anne Celeste Heche was born on May 25, 1969, in Aurora, Ohio. Her father, Donald Heche, was an evangelical Christian and, it turned out, a closeted homosexual man. Her first appearing position was in a New Jersey dinner theater manufacturing of “The Music Man,” which paid her $100 per week.
In 1983, after her father died of AIDS, her mom turned a Christian therapist and lectured on behalf of James Dobson’s group Focus on the Family about “overcoming” homosexuality.
Ms. Heche wrote in her 2001 memoir, “Call Me Crazy,” about being sexually abused by her father, and about her mom’s denial of that abuse. She mentioned that when she known as her mom after years of remedy to confront her about it, her mom ended the dialog by saying, “Jesus loves you, Anne,” earlier than hanging up.
“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life,” Ms. Heche mentioned in an interview with The Times in 2009. “And it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”
In 2018, she mentioned she had been fired from a job at Miramax when she refused to offer oral intercourse to Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie magnate who based the corporate together with his brother, Bob, and who was accused of sexual assault by dozens of ladies. He was convicted of two felony intercourse crimes in 2020 and is serving a 23-year jail sentence.
“If I wasn’t sexually abused as a child, I don’t know if I would have had the strength to stand up to Harvey — and many others, by the way,” she told the podcast “Allegedly … With Theo Von & Matthew Cole Weiss.” “It was not just Harvey, and I will say that.”
Vimal Patel contributed reporting.
