LOS ANGELES — Anne Heche, the Emmy-winning film and television actress whose dramatic rise in Hollywood in the 1990s and prosperous career contrasted with personal chapters of turmoil, died from injuries sustained in a burning car accident. She was 53.
Heche was “peacefully taken 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 lack of oxygen when her car crashed into a house on August 5, according to a statement released on Thursday was released by a representative names of her family and friends.
She was pronounced brain dead on Friday but was being kept alive if her organs could be donated, an investigation that lasted nine days. In the US, most organ transplants are performed after such a determination.
A native of Ohio whose family moved across the country, Heche experienced an abusive and tragic childhood that led her to escape her own life. Showing promise early enough to be offered professional work in high school, she first came to prominence on the NBC soap opera Another World from 1987 to 1991, where she won a Daytime Emmy Award for the role of twins Marley and Vicky Hudson won show lasting injuries which Heches anticipated: Vicky falls into a months-long coma after a car accident.
By the late 1990s, Heche was one of the hottest actors in Hollywood, a constant on magazine covers and in big-budget films. 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 ensemble cast in the original I Know What You Did Last Summer.
The following year, she starred with Ford in Six Days, Seven Nights and appeared in Return to Paradise with Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix. She also played one of cinema’s most famous murder victims, Marion Crane in 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 to even greater fame and upheaval, both personal and professional. She met Ellen DeGeneres at a Vanity Fair Oscar party in 1997, fell in love, and began a three-year relationship that marked one of the first openly gay couples in Hollywood. But Heche later said her career was marred by an industry that balked at casting her in leading roles. She would remember advisors defying her decision to let DeGeneres accompany her to the premiere of “Volcano.”
“We were patted on the back, put in their limousine in act three, and told we couldn’t have photos taken at the press fest,” Heche said on the 2018 podcast Irish Goodbye.
After she and DeGeneres split, Heche had a public meltdown, speaking openly about her mental health issues.
Heche’s faintly elfin appearance belied her on-screen strength. When she won the National Board of Review’s Best Supporting Actress award in 1997, the panel cited the double whammy of “Donnie Brasco” and the political satire “Wag the Dog,” in which Heche portrayed a cynical White House aide and stood up against Movie great Robert De Niro.
Heche also effectively challenged her apparent fragility. In 2002, she played a woman who is afraid of losing her mind like her father, a brilliant math professor, in the Broadway play Proof. An Associated Press review praised her “touching performance, vulnerable yet funny, especially when Catherine pokes fun at suspected mental stability.”
In the fall of 2000, shortly after her split from 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, Call Me Crazy, published the following year, Heche spoke about her lifelong struggles. During a 2001 interview with television journalist Barbara Walters, Heche recounted in painful detail the alleged sexual abuse at the hands of her deeply religious father, Donald Heche, who died of complications from AIDS in 1983. Heche described her suffering as so extreme that she developed a personality of her own and imagined being from another planet.
In the final days of his life, Heche said she learned that he was secretly gay and that she believed his inability to live honestly fueled his anger and hurtful behavior. No longer did her father die, her brother Nathan—one of her four siblings—was killed in a car accident.
“I’m not crazy. But it’s a crazy life. I grew up in a crazy family and it took me 31 years to go crazy,” Heche told Walters. To escape the past, “I drank. I I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did everything I could to take the shame out of my life.”
Heche dated Steve Martin in the 1990s and is widely believed to have inspired the childish but ambitious aspiring actor, played by Heather Graham in his Hollywood spoof Bowfinger. She later had a son with cinematographer Coleman Laffoon, to whom she was married from 2001 to 2009. She had another son during a relationship with actor James Tupper, her co-star on the television series Men In Trees.
Heche has worked consistently in smaller films, on Broadway, and in television shows for the past two decades. She has recently had recurring roles on the network series Chicago PD and All Rise, and was a 2020 contestant on Dancing With the Stars.