UNITED STATES. Los Angeles: US actress Anne Heche is legally dead but will remain on life support to allow for a possible organ donation.
The 53-year-old was involved in a car accident in Los Angeles that left her in a coma for a week.
“Today, we lost a bright light, a kind, and most joyful soul,” her family said in a statement.
Heche acted in movies including Volcano, Donnie Brasco, and the 1998 Psycho adaptation.
The mother of two had an appearance in 2020 on ‘Dancing with the Stars’, the US version of ‘Strictly Come Dancing’.
Heche’s car “erupted in heavy fire,” which took 59 firemen more than an hour to thoroughly put out, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD).
In addition to having burns, the actress also had “a severe anoxic brain injury,” which occurs when the brain is deprived of oxygen, according to her relatives.
The late actress is “legally dead,” according to a publicist, but she will temporarily remain on life support to see if she would be a match for an organ donation.
About Anne Heche
Heche was born in Ohio in 1969, and she and her family frequently changed residences as a child.
Her father died of HIV/Aids when she was 13 years old, and she later claimed that he had frequently raped her as a youngster in her memoir “Call Me Crazy” from 2001.
In interviews for the book, she claimed that the abuse had rendered her “insane” for the first 31 years of her life and that, to feel safe, she had invented a fantasy realm known as the “Fourth Dimension.”
Her brother was murdered in a car accident three months after her father passed away, and she assumed he had committed suicide at the time. The two became separated after her mother refuted both the suicide and the abuse allegations.
Heche was recognised in a school play by a talent agency when her family moved to Chicago.
She rose to fame in the late 1980s thanks to her roles as Vicky Hudson and Marley Love, identical twins, in the serial opera ‘Another World’. She received two Soap Opera Digest Awards and a Daytime Emmy Award for the roles.
Heche gained more fame in the late 1990s when she co-starred with Johnny Depp in the crime drama film ‘Donnie Brasco’ as Maggie. Later, she told Larry King in an interview that working with Depp had been “wonderful.”
She played Amy Barnes, a geologist, and seismologist, opposite Tommy Lee Jones in the catastrophe film ‘Volcano’, and Melissa Missy Egan in the cult horror film ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer‘.
She started dating US talk show personality and comedian Ellen DeGeneres in 1997 after solely dating men before. The well-known pair promised to get into a civil union if it became legal in Vermont, but three years later, they broke up.
Later, Heche reportedly struggled with drug usage and mental health issues. At one point, Heche was hospitalised after parking on a highway in California and heading into the desert.
A new century saw a change in career paths, with parts in more acclaimed small films and fewer blockbusters, such as the drama Birth, the sex comedy ‘Spread’, and the 2011 feature ‘Cedar Rapids,’ which follows a gullible insurance agent on a life-altering business trip to Iowa.
For her performance as Roweena Lawson in the 2004 television movie ‘Gracie’s Choice,’ about a teenage girl who tries to raise her brothers on her own when their drug-addicted mother is sent to jail, she got an Emmy nomination.
She appeared on Broadway in a production of Twentieth Century alongside Alec Baldwin, earning her a nomination for best actress at the Tony Awards the same year.
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