Heche, 53, was legally dead as of Friday, though still with a heartbeat, and was kept on life support to preserve her organs so they could be donated, spokeswoman Holly Baird said. Heche’s Mini Cooper sped away, plowed into a house and burst into flames on August 5. Heche, who starred in “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag The Dog” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” struggled for decades with the effects of a troubled childhood and was part of a pioneering same-sex couple in the decade of 1990. Winner of a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991 for her roles as twin sisters on the NBC soap opera “Another World,” Heche starred in the 1998 adventure comedy “Six Days Seven Nights” with Harrison Ford and co-starred with Demi Moore and Cher in The HBO TV Movie “If These Walls Could Talk.” He became one half of Hollywood’s most famous same-sex couple while dating comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres. Against her studio’s wishes, Heche went public at the 1997 red carpet premiere for the disaster film “Volcano,” taking DeGeneres as her date. The couple were together for more than three years before Heche ended the relationship. In an interview with entertainment website Page Six in October 2021, Heche said she was “blacklisted” by Hollywood because of her relationship with DeGeneres. “I didn’t do a studio photo for 10 years. I got fired from a $10 million deal and didn’t see the light of day on a studio photo.” In 2001 she married Coleman Laffoon, a cameraman. After the couple divorced, Heche began a long-term relationship with actor James Tupper, which ended in 2018. Anne Celeste Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio on May 25, 1969 and was the youngest of five children. At 13, she was devastated by her father’s death from AIDS and the revelation that he had been secretly having a homosexual relationship. “He was in complete denial until the day he died,” Heche told CNN’s Larry King in 2001. She said in 1998 that his death taught her that the most important thing in life is to tell the truth. Her brother Nathan died three months after their father in a car accident. Heche said her father raped her as a child, causing her mental health problems for decades afterward, including frequent fantasies that she was from another planet. “I’m not crazy,” Heche told ABC News in 2001 when her book “Call Me Crazy: A Memoir” was released. “But it’s a crazy life. I grew up in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me.” Heche’s mother, Nancy, denied her daughter’s claim that she knew about the sexual abuse, calling it “lies and blasphemy” and her sister Abigail said she believes “the memories about our father are untrue”. He said that Anne Heche had questioned her own memories of that time. Later in her career, Heche starred as a senior member of the US Defense Intelligence Agency in the NBC television series “The Brave” and appeared on the competition show “Dancing With The Stars” in late 2020. Heche is survived by her two sons, Atlas and Homer. (Reporting by Lisa Richwine, additional reporting by Daniel Trotta and Alistair Bell, editing by Diane Craft)
