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 automotive accident there. She was 53.
Her dying was introduced by a consultant, Holly Baird.
Ms. Heche was critically injured on Aug. 5 when a Mini Cooper she was driving crashed right into a two-story house 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 automotive, 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.
A press release launched by her publicist on behalf of her household on Thursday night time mentioned Ms. Heche had remained in a coma on the Grossman Burn Middle at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles.
“It has lengthy been her option to donate her organs, and he or she is being stored on life help to find out if any are viable,” the assertion mentioned.
On Friday, a consultant mentioned Ms. Heche had been declared brain-dead on Thursday night time.
Ms. Heche was a cleaning soap opera star earlier than she turned identified to film audiences. Within the late Nineteen Eighties, quickly after she graduated from highschool, she joined the solid of the daytime drama “One other World,” the place she performed the nice and evil twins Vicky Hudson and Marley Love. She received 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 greatest pal in “Strolling and Speaking” (1996); Johnny Depp’s spouse in “Donnie Brasco” (1997); a presidential aide within the political satire “Wag the Canine” (1997), with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro; and a trend 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 extra formulaic than this bouncing-screwball valentine, however they don’t get rather more pleasant, both,” Rita Kempley wrote in her overview of “Six Days, Seven Nights” in The Washington Publish. “The identical goes for Heche and Ford as squabbling opposites drawn collectively throughout this tropical journey.”
Ms. Heche started a relationship with Ms. DeGeneres in 1997, at a time when same-sex relationships in Hollywood weren’t absolutely accepted. The connection turned broadly identified in April of that 12 months after they appeared, hand in hand, on the annual White Home Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. A number of days later, Ms. DeGeneres’s character on her sitcom, “Ellen,” got here out as homosexual.
Ms. Heche’s determination to disclose that she was in a lesbian relationship, The New York Occasions wrote, “confronted Hollywood with a extremely delicate downside: the right way to cope with a homosexual actress whose profession has been constructed on enjoying heterosexual roles.”
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.
Full data on her survivors was not instantly accessible.
Ms. Heche advised The New York Publish in 2021 that she had been “blacklisted” in Hollywood due to her relationship with Ms. DeGeneres.
“I didn’t do a studio image for 10 years,” she was quoted as saying. “I used to be fired from a $10 million image deal and didn’t see the sunshine of day in a studio image.”
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 films largely gave approach to visitor appearances on tv exhibits like “Ally McBeal” and “Nip/Tuck.”
She additionally starred within the short-lived sitcom “Males in Bushes,” 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 Restricted prepare, meets a former discovery, Lily Garland (Ms. Heche), who has develop into a Hollywood star. The position earned Ms. Heche a Tony Award nomination for greatest efficiency by a number one actress in a play.
In his overview in The Occasions, Ben Brantley wrote, “Her posture melting between serpentine seductiveness and a avenue fighter’s aggressiveness, her voice shifting between supper-club velvet and dime-store vinyl, Ms. Heche summons a whole gallery of studio-made sirens from the Despair period: Jean Harlow, the pre-mummified Joan Crawford and, sure, Carole Lombard, who famously portrayed Lily in Howard Hawks’s display model 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 Selection,” a TV movie about a teen confronted with elevating her half siblings after their drug-addicted mom is shipped to jail.
She appeared most lately 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 Could 25, 1969, in Aurora, Ohio, to Nancy and Donald Heche. Her father 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 Concentrate on the Household about “overcoming” homosexuality.
Ms. Heche wrote in her 2001 memoir, “Name Me Loopy,” about being sexually abused by her father, and about her mom’s denial of that abuse. She mentioned that when she referred to 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.
“Folks marvel why I’m so forthcoming with the truths which have occurred in my life,” Ms. Heche mentioned in an interview with The Occasions in 2009. “And it’s as a result of the lies that I’ve been surrounded with and the denial that I used to be raised in, for higher or worse, bore a toddler of reality and love.”
In 2018, she mentioned she had been fired from a job at Miramax when she refused to provide oral intercourse to Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie magnate who based the corporate along 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 toddler, I don’t know if I’d have had the power to face as much as Harvey — and lots of others, by the way in which,” she advised the podcast “Allegedly … With Theo Von & Matthew Cole Weiss.” “It was not simply Harvey, and I’ll say that.”
Vimal Patel contributed reporting.