LOS ANGELES (AP) – Anne Heche, the Emmy-winning film and television actress whose dramatic rise in Hollywood in the 1990s and successful career juxtaposed with personal turmoil, has died of injuries sustained in a fire car accident.  It was 53.
Hetze “peacefully came off life support,” spokeswoman Holly Byrd said in a statement Sunday night.
Heche was on life support at a Los Angeles burn center after suffering “severe anoxic brain injury,” caused by a lack of oxygen, when her car crashed into a home on Aug. 5, according to a statement released Thursday by a spokesperson for account of her family and friends.
She was declared brain dead on Friday but was kept on life support in case her organs could be donated, an assessment that took nine days.  In the US, most organ transplants are done after such a determination.
An Ohio native whose family moved across the country, Heche endured an abusive and tragic childhood, one that helped her act out as a way to escape her life.  He showed promise early enough to be offered a professional job in high school and first appeared on the NBC soap opera “Another World” from 1987 to 1991, winning a Daytime Emmy Award for playing injured twins Marley and Vicky Hudson who were waiting for Heche: Vicky falls into a coma for months after a car accident.
In the late 1990s Heche was one of the hottest actors in Hollywood, a fixture on magazine covers and in big budget movies.  It wasn’t until 1997 that he starred opposite Johnny Depp as his husband in ‘Donnie Brasco’ and Tommy Lee Jones in ‘Volcano’ and joined the cast of the original ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’.
The following year, she starred with Ford in “Six Days, Seven Nights” and appeared with Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix in “Return to Paradise.”  She also played one of cinema’s most famous murder victims, “Psycho’s” Marion Crane, in Gus Van Sant’s remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic and co-starred in the indie favorite “Walking and Talking.”
Around the same time, her personal life led to even greater fame, and personal and professional upheaval.  He met Ellen DeGeneres at a Vanity Fair Oscar party in 1997, fell in love and began a 3-year relationship that made them one of Hollywood’s first openly gay couples.  But Heche later said her career had been ruined by an industry wary of casting her in leading roles.  She would remember the advisers who objected to her decision to have DeGeneres join her at the ‘Volcano’ premiere.
“They tapped us on the shoulder, put us in her limo in the third act and told us we couldn’t be photographed at the press junket,” Heche said in 2018 on the Irish Goodbye podcast.
After she and DeGeneres split, Heche had a public meltdown and spoke candidly about her mental health struggles.
Heche’s delicately elfin gaze belied her power on screen.  When she won the National Board of Review’s Best Supporting Actress award in 1997, the board cited the one-two punch of “Donnie Brasco” and the political satire “Wag the Dog,” in which Heche portrayed a cynical White House aide and she was holding hers.  against cinema great Robert De Niro.
Heche also effectively called out her apparent fragility.  In 2002 she starred on Broadway in the play “Proof” as a woman who is afraid of losing her mind just like her father, a brilliant math teacher.  An Associated Press review praised her “touching performance, vulnerable but funny, particularly when Catherine mocks suspicions about her 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 agitated and disoriented and spoke incoherently to residents.
In a memoir released the following year, “Call Me Crazy,” Heche opened up about her lifelong struggles.  During an interview with television journalist Barbara Walters in 2001, Heche recounted in harrowing detail the alleged sexual abuse by her father, Donald Heche, who said he was devoutly religious and died in 1983 of complications from AIDS.  Heche described her suffering so extreme that she developed a distinct personality and imagined herself to be from another planet.
In the final days of his life, Heche said, she learned he was secretly gay and believed his inability to live honestly fueled his anger and abusive behavior.  Shortly after her father’s death, 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 31 years to get the crazy out of me,” Heche told Walters. In an effort to escape the past, “I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did everything I could to get the shame out of my life.”
Hatche 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 camera operator 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 in the TV series “Men In Trees”.
Heche has worked steadily in smaller films, on Broadway and in television shows over the past two decades.  She recently had recurring roles on the network’s series “Chicago PD” and “All Rise,” and in 2020 was a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars.”