Anne Heche

• 1. Introduction

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  Anne Heche was on location in Nebraska in 1991, filming a television movie, when her agent phoned with news that she had won a Daytime Emmy Award. Her reply was a question. "Does this mean I'm an actress?" she asked.

  It is a strange thing to wonder about after winning an industry prize, and it hints at how unsettled her footing could feel. Heche, born in 1969, would go on to work in daytime television, studio films, independent cinema, Broadway and prime-time series. She won awards, earned a Tony Award nomination, and directed. Yet her private life kept pulling attention away from her roles. She became half of a celebrated couple, lived through a public breakdown, and published a memoir that split her family. She died in August 2022, at the age of 53, after a car crash in Los Angeles.

  This documentary follows three questions. What kind of childhood sends a teenager into a professional acting career? How did one famous romance change the way Hollywood treated her? And what do the official records say about the last days of her life?

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• 2. A Restless Childhood

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  On the 25th of May 1969, Anne Celeste Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio, the youngest of five children. Her parents, Donald and Nancy, were fundamentalist Christians, and she later likened the household to a cult. Her father drifted between jobs and chased get-rich-quick schemes. He also had a real gift for music, which kept landing him positions as a church choir director. The family switched denominations whenever his work took him to a new congregation.

  In 1977 one of his schemes moved the family to the Atlantic City area of New Jersey, first to Ventnor City and then to Ocean City. Young Anne worked at a boardwalk hamburger stand, where she sang songs from Annie to draw customers. Money stayed tight. A home her father owned went into foreclosure, and the family was later evicted from a rental. A family from their church took them in out of charity. Her mother then separated from her father and told him to leave, and she and the children all took jobs. Anne's first professional acting work was at a dinner theater in Swainton, paying $100 a week.

  Don Heche moved to New York City, where his daughters sometimes visited and saw his health fading. He told them he had cancer. In fact he had late-stage AIDS. He lived as a gay man in New York but hid both his sexuality and his illness from his family. They had never heard of AIDS until they came across a New York Times article about a month before he died. He died of AIDS-related complications on the 3rd of March 1983, aged 45. In a 1998 interview, Anne said his secrecy "destroyed his happiness and our family. But it did teach me to tell the truth. Nothing else is worth anything."

  Three months after that, her 18-year-old brother Nathan lost control of his car and hit a tree, and he died. Heche later described his death as a suicide, a claim her mother and surviving siblings dispute. The rest of the family then moved to Chicago to be near relatives. Anne, her mother and her sister Abigail, who had left college, shared a one-bedroom apartment that Anne compared to a dorm room.

  At the progressive Francis W. Parker School, Heche kept acting, appearing in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth and Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead. When she was 16, a talent scout saw her in a school play and invited her to audition for the soap opera As the World Turns. She flew to New York with her mother and was offered a part. She could not take it, because the job would have meant moving the family mid-school-year and her mother leaving a new post at a brokerage firm. In her memoir, Heche wrote that she badly wanted to get out from under her mother's control.

  In 1987, at the end of her senior year, a second audition came, this time for the soap opera Another World. She was offered a role after two auditions and accepted it over her mother's objections. She was in New York and working on set just days after her high school graduation. Looking back, she said, "I did my time with my mom in a one-bedroom, skanky apartment and I was done." The part she had won was a double one.

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• 3. From Soap Opera to Screen

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  Vicky Hudson and Marley Love were twins, and Heche played both of them on Another World for nearly four years, from 1987 to 1991. The show brought her several awards. When she left, she had no other screen work lined up and no wish to stay in a genre that the wider acting world treated as minor.

  Parsons School of Design in New York City had accepted her, and she kept it as a backup plan. Then came an offer for a small supporting role in O Pioneers!, a Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of the Willa Cather novel with Jessica Lange. She chose the part over design school. On her agent's advice, she moved to Los Angeles within days of the shoot wrapping. The film aired in February 1992 as her first television movie, and her performance drew some positive notice.

  A guest spot on Murphy Brown was filmed after O Pioneers! but aired in November 1991, which made it her prime-time debut. Afterward she decided that one-off guest roles would hurt her long-term prospects, and she mostly avoided them until the 2000s.

  In 1991 and 1992 she took stage roles in Los Angeles, including Us & Them, a slice-of-life piece about Generation X, and Getting Away With Murder, a stage version of two James M. Cain stories. Her theatrical film debut came in early 1993 in An Ambush of Ghosts, a little-seen independent film directed by Everett Lewis. Soon afterward she appeared with Elijah Wood in the Disney film The Adventures of Huck Finn. Over the next two years she took bit parts in features such as A Simple Twist of Fate, in 1994, and larger supporting roles in cable movies such as Girls in Prison and Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long.

  Donald Cammell's Wild Side, from 1995, gave her a first lead, though she received third billing behind Christopher Walken and Joan Chen. The straight-to-video erotic thriller drew notoriety for a very frank love scene between Heche and Chen. In 1996 she starred in a segment of the HBO anthology If These Walls Could Talk, playing a college student weighing an abortion, alongside Jada Pinkett Smith and Cher. That year she also played a childhood best friend opposite Catherine Keener in Walking and Talking. Critics liked it, and Entertainment Weekly later placed it at number 47 on its list of the top 50 cult films of all time. Alison Macor of The Austin Chronicle wrote that Heche "is destined for larger film roles". The prediction came true the following year, in a crime drama starring Johnny Depp.

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• 4. The Breakthrough Years

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  In Donnie Brasco, Johnny Depp played an undercover FBI agent, and Heche played his wife. The 1997 crime drama is often named as her breakthrough. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that she "does well with what could have been a thankless role".

  Three other major releases that year gave her supporting parts. In the disaster film Volcano, she played a seismologist alongside Tommy Lee Jones and Gaby Hoffmann. Reviews were mixed, but the film took in US$122 million at the international box office. In the slasher hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, with Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr., she played a backwoods loner in a small part. Some reviewers, including Derek Eller of Variety, still called her a standout.

  In the political satire Wag the Dog, with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, she played a presidential advisor, a role originally written for a man. The film cost US$15 million to make and earned US$64 million. For Wag the Dog and Donnie Brasco together, she received the 1997 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress.

  Her first lead in a major film arrived in 1998 with Six Days, Seven Nights. She played a New York City journalist who is stranded on a deserted island with a pilot, played by Harrison Ford, after a crash landing. Reviews were mixed, but it grossed US$74.3 million in North America and US$164.8 million worldwide. A second starring part followed in the drama Return to Paradise, as the love interest of Vince Vaughn's character. A New York Times writer said her formidable Beth Eastern turned the film into something closer to an ethical debate than a thriller.

  Gus Van Sant's Psycho, also from 1998, remade the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film. Heche took the Marion Crane role first played by Janet Leigh, the embezzler who ends up at a roadside motel run by Norman Bates, played by Vaughn. Reviews were negative, and the film made US$37.1 million worldwide against a US$60 million budget. Janet Maslin still found Heche "refreshingly cast" and called her portrayal "almost as demure as Ms. Leigh's, yet she's also more headstrong and flirty." Those three 1998 films were the only theatrically released movies in which she led. In 1999 she co-starred with Ed Harris in The Third Miracle, directed by Agnieszka Holland, but by then much of her energy was going toward a different craft.

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• 5. Ellen and the Camera

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  Ellen DeGeneres and Heche began dating in 1997, and The Advocate described them as the first gay supercouple. At one point they said they would seek a civil union if Vermont made it legal. Heche had been cast in Six Days, Seven Nights one day before their relationship became public. She said she was told she would lose that part over it, yet she kept it.

  Heche said the relationship cost her professionally. She recalled being warned not to bring DeGeneres to the premiere of Volcano, and she said they were escorted out before the film ended when they came anyway. She did not work in a studio picture for 10 years afterward. "People said, 'You're not getting a job because you're gay,'" she said. "How could that destroy my career? I still can't wrap my head around it." On a later podcast she also claimed that DeGeneres tried to have her institutionalized and that she was effectively blacklisted from DeGeneres's talk show. Those claims are hers, and the source records no response. In her last memoir, Heche wrote that she never identified as a lesbian and did not see the words gay or straight as relevant to her.

  Between 1998 and 2001 she pulled back from acting and put her effort into directing, often from her own screenplays. Stripping for Jesus, a 1998 short she paid for herself, followed an evangelical Christian stripper who writes Bible verses on her body so she can reach clients in a language they understand. Heche called it a metaphor for her life as she saw it. Suzanne Krull and Karen Black appeared with her.

  In 2000 she directed a segment of the HBO anthology If These Walls Could Talk 2, which followed lesbian life across several decades. Her segment, titled "2000", starred DeGeneres and Sharon Stone as a couple trying to have a baby through artificial insemination, with DeGeneres among the executive producers. In 2001 she directed Reaching Normal for Showtime's On the Edge, a science fiction anthology in which actresses directed the episodes. She adapted Walter M. Miller Jr.'s short story Command Performance, with Andie MacDowell and Paul Rudd as a housewife and her telepathic extramarital connection, and a cameo from DeGeneres.

  She also shot a documentary about DeGeneres's 2000 stand-up tour, titled Ellen DeGeneres: American Summer. It was never finished. DeGeneres, who financed it, says she tried to salvage the footage after the couple split in August 2000. She says she then "burned" it, because the memories it stirred were too painful. Immediately after the separation, Heche got into her car and drove.

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• 6. Memory, Family and Love

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  On the 19th of August 2000, Heche drove up Interstate 5 from Los Angeles toward the San Joaquin Valley. She left the highway where she later said she had been told to, and she ended up at Cantua Creek, a rural spot in western Fresno County. She abandoned her car on a rural road. Wearing only a bra and shorts, she walked about 1.5 miles in punishing heat with no water before knocking on a ranch house door.

  The homeowner recognized her from Six Days, Seven Nights and was stunned that a celebrity had turned up in such a remote place. Heche asked for a shower, then for slippers, then suggested they watch a movie. After about half an hour, the unsettled homeowner called the Fresno County Sheriff's Department. Heche later told officers she had taken ecstasy, and she told deputies she was "God, and was going to take everyone back to heaven...in a spaceship." An ambulance took her to Fresno's University Medical Center, where staff described a psychotic break. She was released within a few hours.

  Heche later traced the episode to a crisis that began around the end of filming on Donnie Brasco, when she said she started hearing God speak to her. That first voice lasted twelve days. She said it told her that she had an inner being called Celestia, an incarnation of God and the Second Coming of Jesus, and that she was famous in order to enlighten humanity. Celestia and her spiritual experiences lasted about four more years. She described speaking in tongues, automatic writing and drawing, clairvoyance, psychic healing and stigmata on her feet.

  In 2001 she published the memoir Call Me Crazy. She wrote that she had blocked out much of her childhood and first entered therapy during her years on Another World. She went on to Reichian body psychotherapy, which she said released body memories, and later to guided LSD therapy, which she said restored her memories in full. The book alleged that her father had raped her repeatedly from infancy until she was 12 and that her mother was in denial. During a series of nationally televised interviews in September 2001, she said she had invented a fantasy world called the Fourth Dimension, and the alter ego Celestia, to feel safe. She called herself insane for the first 31 years of her life and said she recovered after Cantua Creek.

  Heche's mother, Nancy, denied the allegations and said she found no place for herself among what she called lies and blasphemies in the book. Her sister Abigail said she believed Anne sincerely held these memories but considered them untrue. Abigail added that Anne herself had once expressed doubts, and that the claim that their mother knew was false. A rift with her mother had already opened when Heche first disclosed her relationship with DeGeneres. Nancy Heche has worked as a Christian therapist since 1997, and since 2005 she has focused on "overcoming homosexuality", speaking at events run by evangelical and Christian right groups, including the ex-gay ministry Love Won Out. In 2009 Heche told The New York Times that her mother's work was a way to keep the pain of the truth out. In 2011 she told The Daily Telegraph that she had reconciled with Abigail.

  Three of her four older siblings died before her. Susan Bergman, the eldest, born in 1957, died in 2006 of a brain tumor. She had written Anonymity, a 1994 memoir about their closeted father. Another sister, Cynthia, died at two months old of a heart defect. Elliot and Natalie Bergman of the band Wild Belle are Anne's nephew and niece, and in 2017 she called their album Dreamland her favorite.

  Heche's romantic life stretched well beyond DeGeneres. She spent about a year with Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac in the early 1990s. She spent about two years in the mid-1990s with Steve Martin, whom she met on the set of A Simple Twist of Fate. In 2000 she left DeGeneres for Coleman "Coley" Laffoon, a cameraman she had hired for the documentary, and they married on the 1st of September 2001. Their son Homer was born in March 2002. Laffoon filed for divorce in February 2007, saying in a separate filing that Heche showed bizarre and delusional behavior and refused professional help. The divorce was final in March 2009.

  She then left Laffoon for James Tupper, her co-star on Men in Trees. She called the two of them eternally engaged. Their son Atlas was born in March 2009, and they separated in January 2018. In 2019 she and her former Hung co-star Thomas Jane announced a relationship. They stayed together into 2020 but had separated by the time of her death.

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• 7. Stage, Series and Voice

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  Heche made her Broadway debut in 2002 in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Proof, as a young woman who has inherited her father's mathematical genius and mental illness. The New York Times called her "consequential" and judged her take equally viable beside those of Mary-Louise Parker and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Earlier work in the period included Dr. Sterling in Prozac Nation, which premiered at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, and a hospital administrator in John Q., which earned US$102.2 million worldwide despite negative reviews. She also had a recurring part on the fourth season of Ally McBeal.

  In 2004 she earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for the Lifetime movie Gracie's Choice. That same year she played a chorus girl turned star opposite Alec Baldwin in a Broadway revival of Twentieth Century, which brought a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play. She also appeared with Nicole Kidman in the independent drama Birth. Recurring roles followed on The WB's Everwood and on Nip/Tuck, where she played an ex-mob wife in witness protection who needed plastic surgery.

  Men in Trees, which began in 2006, gave her a series of her own. She played a New York author who moves to a small Alaska town full of single men after discovering her fiance is cheating. Production was cut short by the writers' strike, and the show was canceled in May 2008. In 2009 she took the supporting role of the ex-wife of a struggling coach-turned-gigolo in HBO's Hung, which ran until 2011. She also played the girlfriend of a narcissistic gigolo in the sex comedy Spread.

  Cedar Rapids, in 2011, offered a sharper turn, with Heche as a seductive insurance agent who captivates Ed Helms's naive character. The Sundance premiere drew critical praise, and David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter said she struck a sweet balance between mischief and motherliness. That year she also played one of two sisters who were both married to a corrupt police officer, played by Woody Harrelson, in Rampart. In 2013 she led the short-lived NBC sitcom Save Me, as a Midwestern housewife who believes she is channeling God. In 2016 she starred with Sandra Oh in Catfight, as one of two bitter rivals whose grudge match spans a lifetime. The Los Angeles Times praised both women for performances free of vanity.

  In 2017 she played Joyce, the mentally ill mother of the teenage Jeffrey Dahmer, in My Friend Dahmer. The Hollywood Reporter called the performance "nerve-jangling perfection", and Empire called it "entertainingly off-kilter." On the 25th of September 2017 she began the NBC thriller The Brave as DIA Deputy Director Patricia Campbell, and the series lasted one season. In 2018 she joined Chicago P.D. in a supporting role. In late 2020 she took part in the 29th season of Dancing with the Stars, finishing in 13th place after being eliminated in the fourth week. Her voice also appeared in animation, as Lois Lane in Superman: Doomsday and as Suyin Beifong in The Legend of Korra.

  She worked in audio too. She narrated the audiobook of Call Me Crazy, and she narrated Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. In 2017 she hosted a weekly SiriusXM radio show with Jason Ellis called Love and Heche. In late 2020 she launched the podcast Better Together with Heather Duffy Boylston. In a January 2018 episode of another podcast, Allegedly, she accused Harvey Weinstein of exposing himself to her and of firing her from an unnamed Miramax film after she refused his advances. A spokesman for Weinstein called him "friendly" with her and denied all of it.

  In 2021, on Better Together, she said she was writing a second memoir. It was to be called Call Me Sane, and it later became Call Me Anne. She submitted the manuscript shortly before her death, and it was announced for publication in January 2023.

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• 8. The Last Week

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  On the 5th of August 2022, a Mini Clubman driven by Heche set off three collisions in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles. The first, with an apartment garage, caused minor damage. A video released by TMZ shows an unidentified man shouting "Out of the car!" at the driver, who then reversed and left. TMZ also reported a second hit-and-run, in which she struck a Jaguar without stopping. Its driver was not hurt. Footage from that incident shows her speeding down an alley and nearly hitting a pedestrian. A doorbell camera then caught her racing along a residential street, followed seconds later by the sound of a crash.

  In the third collision, her car struck a house, broke through a wall and ended up 30 feet inside the building. Heche was trapped. The car caught fire, and the flames spread through the whole structure. The fire took 65 minutes to extinguish and required 59 firefighters. They could not reach Heche to free her for 45 minutes after they arrived, and at first they did not know anyone was inside the car. By then she had suffered severe burns and smoke inhalation. The house was left structurally unsafe and uninhabitable. The tenant, Lynne Mishele, was at the back of the house and had only minor injuries. Her attorney said she and her pets had "almost lost their lives" and that she lost everything she owned.

  Officials first said Heche was "deemed to be under the influence and acting erratically." The Los Angeles Police Department reported that a preliminary blood analysis found cocaine and narcotics including fentanyl. The coroner's report later concluded that she was not impaired when the crash happened.

  As rescuers carried her out, she was filmed sitting up on the stretcher and struggling with firefighters before losing consciousness. She went first to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and then to the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital. On the 8th of August, a representative said she was in a coma, in critical condition, and on a ventilator, and that earlier reports of a stable condition were inaccurate. On the 11th of August, the representative said she was not expected to survive an anoxic brain injury. She was kept on life support so doctors could judge whether her organs could be donated, as she had wished. A few hours later she was declared brain dead, which counts as legal death under California law. Police had been investigating the crash as a felony DUI collision and stopped once she was declared brain dead.

  On the 14th of August, her publicist announced that organ recipients had been found, and the donation procedure took place that day. Hospital staff held an honor walk. That evening her publicist said she had been "peacefully taken off life support." The county medical examiner recorded the cause of death as inhalation and thermal injuries, listed a sternal fracture from blunt trauma as another significant condition, and ruled it an accident.

  The autopsy results came out on the 6th of December 2022. They stated that she was not impaired by illicit substances at the time. An inactive cocaine metabolite showed prior use, and cannabinoids in her urine, but not her blood, also pointed to earlier use. Fentanyl in her system came from hospital treatment. Her cremated remains were placed in a mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on the 14th of May 2023.

  On the 31st of August 2022, her older son Homer Heche Laffoon petitioned the Los Angeles County probate court. He said she had died without a will and asked to be named administrator. His lawyer also asked for a third-party guardian for his half-brother Atlas. On the 15th of September, James Tupper objected. He argued that a 2011 email in which Heche set out her wishes should count as her will. He also said that Homer, then 20, lacked the maturity and the personal assets needed to post the required bond. In November the court appointed Homer general administrator. In early 2024 he stated that the estate could not pay its debts of over $6 million, which included the $2 million Mishele was seeking.

  Several of Heche's finished projects were still in post-production when she died. Girl in Room 13, a Lifetime film about human trafficking, aired with a dedication to her memory. Supercell, a disaster film with Alec Baldwin, was released on the 17th of March 2023. Wildfire: The Legend of the Cherokee Ghost Horse, a family film based on the Michael Martin Murphey song, is slated to be her final screen performance.

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