ANNE HECHE
(25 May 1969 – 8 August 2022)
The American actress Anne Heche has died aged 53, following two car crashes. Severely burnt, she was cut out of the wreckage, hospitalised but later fell into a coma with brain damage. Then her life support was switched off, a sad ending to a popular actress in films and on television. She generally chose worthwhile projects such as A Simple Twist of Fate - Steve Martin's version of George Eliot's Silas Marner - then The Juror with Demi Moore, Nicole Holofcener's independent cult debut Walking and Talking, Donnie Brasco with Al Pacino and Johnny Depp, the terrifying, big-budget Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, and Six Days, Seven Nights with Harrison Ford. She played Marian Crane in Gus Van Sant's reverential but pointless remake of Psycho.
Her early television work included The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, John Frankenheimer's prison docudrama Against the Wall, Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long with John Goodman, and If These Walls Could Talk, with Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek and Cher. She also appeared on Ellen, the sit-com starring Ellen DeGeneres with whom Heche had a three-year relationship.
Anne Celeste Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio, the daughter of Donald and Nancy Heche, a poor family always on the move. When they relocated to New Jersey, Anne went to work in a dinner theatre in Swainton. Her promiscuous father, who often abused her, died of HIV/Aids in 1983. Three months later her 18-year-old brother Nathan, one of five children, died in a car crash, possibly by suicide. Moving to Chicago in 1985, she was spotted by an agent in a school play, had an audition and joined the television soap opera Another World, playing twins, staying for five years and winning a Daytime Emmy in the process.
With her family background of gay father, religious mother and suicidal brother, life was not easy, which may account for her history of drug abuse and emotional health problems. She was known to have taken ecstasy and once became incomprehensible after checking in at a local LA ranch house. She herself admitted that for the first thirty years of her life she had been insane due to her father's sexual abuse. Possibly under the influence of her religious mother, she claimed to be a daughter of God.
From 2000 Heche appeared in many films and TV series and also made her Broadway debut in David Auburn's Proof, an award-winning play about mathematics and mental illness. She also did a revival of the Hecht and MacArthur play Twentieth Century. Her later films included Birth with Nicole Kidman, Sexual Life, an adaptation of Schnitzler's La Ronde, My Friend Dahmer (playing Jeffrey Dahmer’s mentally ill mother), and 13 Minutes, the 2021 disaster movie about four Oklahoman families caught up in a tornado. It was her last film but there are still more film and TV projects as yet unreleased.
Her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres broke up in 2000. Heche then met and married the cameraman Coleman Laffoon and they have a son, Homer. In 2009 they divorced and Heche then married James Tupper, her co-star in her own TV series, Men in Trees. They have a son, Atlas, but were divorced in 2018. Anne Heche published Call Me Crazy: A Memoir in 2001.
MICHAEL DARVELL