AUGUST 14 (Portal) – American actress Anne Heche will be taken off life support on Sunday, nine days after she suffered serious injuries in a car crash, as a compatible person was found who received her donated organs, a spokesman said.
Heche, 53, had been legally dead as of Friday, although she still had a heart attack, and was being kept alive to preserve her organs so they could be donated, spokeswoman Holly Baird said.
Speeding out of control, Heche’s Mini Cooper crashed into a house and burst into flames on August 5.
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Heche, who starred in the films Donnie Brasco, Wag the Dog and I Know What You Did Last Summer, struggled for decades to cope with the aftermath of a troubled childhood and was part of a groundbreaking same-sex couple in the 1990s.
Heche received a 1991 Daytime Emmy Award for her roles as identical twin sisters on the NBC soap opera Another World. She starred in the 1998 adventure comedy Six Days Seven Nights with Harrison Ford and starred alongside Demi Moore and Cher in the HBO TV movie If These Walls Could Talk.
She became one half of Hollywood’s most famous same-sex couple at the time while dating comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres. Against the wishes of her studio, Heche made a public appearance on the red carpet at the 1997 premiere of the disaster film Volcano, taking DeGeneres as her date.
The couple dated for more than three years before Heche ended the relationship.
In an October 2021 interview with entertainment website Page Six, Heche said she was “blacklisted” by Hollywood for her relationship with DeGeneres. “I haven’t done a studio picture for 10 years. I got fired from a $10 million deal and never saw the light of day in a studio picture.”
In 2001 she married cinematographer Coleman Laffoon. After the couple’s divorce, Heche began a long-term relationship with actor James Tupper, which ended in 2018.
Anne Celeste Heche was born on May 25, 1969 in Aurora, Ohio, the youngest of five children. At age 13, she was shocked by her father’s death from AIDS and the revelation that he had secret gay relationships.
“He was in complete denial up to the point of his death,” 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 in a car accident three months after their father.
Heche said her father raped her as a child, causing her mental health problems for decades, including frequent fantasies that she was from another planet.
“I’m not crazy,” Heche told ABC News in 2001 at the release of her book, Call Me Crazy: A Memoir.
“But it’s a crazy life. I grew up in a crazy family and it took me 31 years to go crazy.”
Heche’s mother Nancy denied her daughter’s claims that she knew about the sexual abuse, calling it “lies and blasphemy” and her sister Abigail said she believes the “memories of our father are untrue”. She said that Anne Heche doubted even her own memories of that time.
Later in her career, Heche starred as a senior member of the Defense Intelligence Agency on the NBC TV series The Brave and appeared on the late 2020 competition show Dancing With The Stars.
Heche leaves behind her two sons, Atlas and Homer.
(History corrected to show she is being taken off life support, not that she was.)
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Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta and Alistair Bell; Editing by Diane Craft
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