Aug 14 (Reuters) – U.S. actress Anne Heche will be taken off life support on Sunday, nine days after she was seriously injured in a violent car crash, as a compatible person was found to receive her donated organs, a source said. a spokesperson.
Heche, 53, had been legally dead since Friday, but 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 spun out of control, crashed into a house and caught fire 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 with the fallout of a troubled childhood and was part of a couple revolutionary homosexual in the 1990s.
Winner of a 1991 Daytime Emmy Award for her roles as identical twin sisters on the NBC soap opera “Another World,” Heche starred in the 1998 comedy adventure “Six Days Seven Nights” with Harrison Ford and starred alongside of Demi Moore and Cher in the HBO TV movie “If These Walls Could Talk”.
She became one half of Hollywood’s most famous gay couple when she dated comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres. Against her studio’s wishes, Heche went public at the 1997 red carpet premiere for the disaster movie “Volcano,” bringing DeGeneres as her date.
The couple had been together for over three years before Heche ended the relationship.
In an interview with entertainment website Page Six in October 2021, Heche said she had been “blacklisted” by Hollywood due to her relationship with DeGeneres. “I haven’t done a studio shot for 10 years. I got kicked out of a 10 million dollar contract and I haven’t seen the light of day in a studio shot.”
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 shocked by her father’s death from AIDS and the revelation that he had been having secret homosexual relationships.
“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 was to say the truth.
His 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 issues for decades, including frequent fantasies that she was from another planet.
“I’m not crazy,” Heche told ABC News in 2001 upon the release of her book “Call Me Crazy: A Memoir.”
“But it’s a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years for me to be crazy.”
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 believed “memories about our father are false”. She said that Anne Heche had herself questioned her own memories of that time.
Later in her career, Heche starred as a senior member of the Defense Intelligence Agency on the NBC television series “The Brave” and appeared on the competition show “Dancing With The Stars” in late 2020.
Heche is survived by his two sons, Atlas and Homer.
(The story corrects to show that she will be removed from life support, not that she was.)
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Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta and Alistair Bell; edited by Diane Craft
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