Triumph and tragedy: Actress Anne Heche dead at 53

2022-08-12

Anne Heche’s lifelong search for love and success: Actress spent decades trying to escape traumatic childhood marred by sexual abuse at the hands of her secretly-gay father – whose assaults and early death from AIDS inspired her on-screen career

Heche, 53, has died from injuries sustained in a fiery car crash, one week after she careened her Mini Cooper into a Los Angeles home while driving under the influence of cocaine at 90 mph
Her family is keeping her on life support, even though she has officially been declared ‘brain dead’; she is being kept on a ventilator to determine if her organs are viable for donation
The actress has been open in the past about her difficult childhood and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, a closeted homosexual who worked as a Baptist minister and choir director
Heche said her schizophrenic ‘sexual deviant’ father gave her genital herpes as an infant and ‘forced her on all fours’ to rape her; when she confronted her mother years later, she responded ‘Jesus loves you Anne’
Her father was one of the first people in the US to be diagnosed with AIDS after it emerged he lived a secret life as a homosexual; he succumbed to the virus in 1983 when the actress was 13
Following his death, Heche’s mother began a lifelong religious crusade against homosexuality and admonished her daughter multiple times for her sexuality
Months after her father’s death, Heche’s brother died when he plowed his car into a tree which Heche said was an intentional suicide
Heche is survived by her two sons, Atlas Tupper, 13 and Homer Laffoon, 20; in a statement her family said: ‘She will be remembered for her courageous honesty and dearly missed for her light’

Anne Heche spent a lifetime spent ‘searching,’ she once said. Searching for peace, happiness and love, while chasing idle dreams, addictions, and toxic relationships in a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness that plagued her from an itinerant childhood, and profoundly dysfunctional and deeply religious family.

Even as the on-screen star stepped into the Hollywood spotlight, she could not escape the darkness of her childhood, when she was sexually abused at the hands of her devout Baptist father, who gave her herpes as a toddler before he became one of the first people in the United States to die of AIDS.

Actress Anne Heche, 53, has died from injuries following a fiery car crash last week. She was under the influence of cocaine when she careened her Mini Cooper car into a Los Angeles home at 90 mph, which immediately burst into flames

‘I think everything I’ve done in all my insanity was to try to get my parents to love me,’ Heche once said.

‘My father loved movie stars. I decided I needed to become famous to get his love. My mother loved Jesus. That was her thing. So I wanted to become Jesus Christ.’

Heche died today at the age of 53 from injuries sustained in a horrific car crash last Friday, after spending nearly a week on life support, a tragic end to a life spent desperately trying to overcome the trauma of her earliest years.

Despite her turbulent childhood, Heche found fame in the film industry, where she was known for her demure and complex onscreen roles throughout the 1990s. But fame is fickle, especially in that chatterbox of a town that can so quickly turn on its brightest stars.

Just as Heche looked destined to deliver on her youthful promise, she struggled with her inner demons on a world stage.

Her father, Donald, led a bizarre duplicitous life. By day, he was a closeted homosexual and God-fearing Baptist choir leader; by night, he left Heche’s mother and four children at home to cruise gay bars in their hometown of Aurora, Ohio.

‘He raped me… he fondled me, he put me on all fours and had sex with me,’ Heche disclosed in her unsparingly candid 2001 memoir, titled ‘Call Me Crazy.’

Heche told The Advocate in a November 2001 interview saying: ‘My father was a schizophrenic. He lived two complete lives, one as a heterosexual man who directed the choir and had a family and one who went away. We didn’t know what he did until years later.’

When Heche was 13, he died of AIDS in 1983, leaving the family destitute and homeless.

Three months later, Heche’s 18-year-old brother, Nathan, crashed his car into a tree and was killed, in an act that Heche thinks was intentional suicide. That’s just scratching the surface of the actress’s troubled and tragic life.

Her family is keeping her on life support, even though she has officially been declared ‘brain dead’; she is being kept on a ventilator to determine if her organs are viable for donation.

It was revealed that she was high on cocaine when she careened her blue Mini Cooper into a Los Angeles house at 90 mph last Friday, which immediately sparked a massive fire and took 59 firefighters to extricate the actress from the wreckage.

Though she was reportedly communicative at the time, Heche slipped into a coma shortly after and never regained consciousness. She is said to have suffered from a ‘severe anoxic brain injury.’

Heche is survived by her two sons, Atlas, 13 and Homer, 20. In a statement made to the public, her family said: ‘She will be remembered for her courageous honesty and dearly missed for her light.’

The actress is survived by her two sons, Homer Laffoon, 20, and Atlas Tupper, 13 (pictured with her ex-husband James Tupper in 2012). In a statement, the family said: ‘She will be remembered for her courageous honesty and dearly missed for her light’

Heche began a high-profile affair with Ellen DeGeneres in 1997. She said it was her first lesbian romance and claimed ‘it was the best sex I’ve ever had.’ As a result of their public breakup in 2000, Heche said she was blacklisted from Hollywood and her relationship with her mother was strained because she thought her daughter’s same-sex romance was ‘a sin’

Heche married cameraman Coley Laffoon in 2001. They had one son, named Homer, born in 2002, before the couple divorced in 2009

Heche was born the youngest of five children on May 25, 1969 in Aurora, Ohio. Her sister, Cynthia died as an infant of a heart defect.

Her mother Nancy, was a housewife whom Heche once described as ‘eerily compliant’ while her father was a med-school dropout with a checkered professional life. Her family constantly move around as her father struggled to provide for his family by working as a Methodist choir organist.

‘He said that he was involved in a business of gas and oil. And he said that until the day he died. But he never was involved in the business of gas and oil ever,’ Heche told Larry King in 2001.

‘We were poor, but we said we were rich. We were falling apart, but we said we were good Christians. We had a father who lived a double life, but we pretended that we were absolutely fine,’ she said to The Tampa Bay Times. ‘We lived on the streets but said we didn’t. Everything we did was a lie. Denial, denial, denial.’

The Heche family joined a fundamentalist Christian sect in the 1960s and moved to a rural religious compound where they were completely cutoff from the modern world. In her own 2006 memoir, ‘The Truth Comes Out,’ Nancy Heche explained that she ‘missed the ’60s there, never reading a newspaper, listening to the radio or watching television.’

Don was always hatching doomed ‘million dollar’ business schemes that were supposed to bail the family out of poverty, but inevitably, Heche and her three siblings were forced to live off the kindness of strangers and neighbors.

‘We all played this false game that we were a happy family,’ Heche once told Allure. ‘It wasn’t until we got kicked out of our last house that we all suddenly realized we’d been lied to.’

The sexual abuse Heche experienced at the hands of her father lasted until she was 12-years-old.

‘He raped me, he stuck his d**k in my mouth, he fondled me, he put me on all fours, and had sex with me,’ said Heche in an interview with Barbara Walters, qualifying that the abuse started when she was an infant.

In her memoir, Anne recalled how her mother had trouble putting diapers on her as a baby because of rashes and sores she had on her vagina, but never knew they were herpes, or where they came from.

‘I had a rash, I had sores, I had welts on my nose and on my lips,’ said the actress.

‘My mother was a good Christian woman. She did not confront her husband. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t scream. She didn’t yell,’ explained Heche.

When Heche was 12, the family resettled in New Jersey and it was there that she began her acting career with her first professional role at a dinner theatre production of The Music Man.

‘I got $100 a week, which was more than anyone else in my family. We all pooled our money in an envelope in a drawer and saved up enough to move out after a year,’ she recalled to the The Telegraph.

‘I found heaven on that stage,’ she said. ‘I’d been given an opportunity to experience a life and a joy that was not in my family.’

In 1983, her father, Donald, became one of the first people in the United States to be diagnosed with AIDS, which was how his family came to learn that the Baptist minister and choir director had been living a secret homosexual double life.

According to Heche, her father never admitted to being gay. He died from the disease at the age of 45.

‘He was in complete denial until the day he died,’ the actress told CNN’s Larry King in 2001. ‘We know he got it from his gay relationships. Absolutely. I don’t think it was just one. He was a very promiscuous man, and we knew his lifestyle then.

‘I think my father was a sexual addict. I think he saw everybody as a sexual being. But I think at that time he was living a very flamboyant homosexual lifestyle. You know, at that time there were bath houses where the whole trick was how many can you do a night. You know, there is no question of what he was doing at that time.’

Heche said her schizophrenic ‘sexual deviant’ father, Donald Heche, gave her genital herpes as an infant and forced her on all fours to rape her. A closeted homosexual, Donald was one of the first people in the United States to be diagnosed with AIDS after it emerged he lived a secret life as a homosexual; he succumbed to the virus in 1983 when the actress was 13

In 1997, Heche starred in a string of commercial success such as ‘Volcano,’ ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer,’ and ‘Wag the Dog’ alongside Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman (pictured)

Heche and son Homer Laffoon arrive at ‘This Is It’ premiere in 2009

In 1998, Heche revived the role of Marion Crane in Gus Van Sant’s remake of ‘Pyscho.’ A critic for the New York Times said she was ‘refreshingly cast in Marion’s role,’ while noting that her portrayal was ‘as almost as demure as Ms. [Janet] Leigh’s, yet she’s also more headstrong and flirty’

Heche poses alongside costar Vince Vaughn during the ‘Return to Paradise’ premiere. The actors would also share the screen in the 1998 remake of ‘Psycho’ – in which Heche played the titular blonde and Vaughn steps into the serial killer role of Normal Bates

Heche said in her book that during her 20s, she had romantic affairs with much older men such as comedian Steve Martin and Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsay Buckingham. In her book, Heche wrote about her thoughts of Martin saying: ‘Why couldn’t my father have been more like him?’

Heche lived in fear believing that her father might have transmitted AIDS to her, and was told by doctors that she wouldn’t know until a number of years later if she actually had the disease.

Very little was known how the disease was spread at the time. She recalled that back then, they believed you could contract the illness ‘from touch, you could get it if somebody kissed you. There was so much fear around his death. There was so much shame around his death,’ she told Larry King.

After his death, Nancy Heche became a Christian therapist who lectured on the ‘evils’ of homosexuality. She worked on behalf of James Dobson’s ‘Focus on the Family’ and believed that people could ‘overcome’ homosexuality through faith in Jesus Christ.

Tragedy struck the family again, just three months later when her brother, Nathan was killed in a car crash after apparently falling asleep at the wheel and crashing into a tree. He was 18.

Heche has said she believes he committed suicide. The Camden Courier-Post reported that Nathan was traveling along on a wet road when he careered into a tree.

After the deaths of her father and brother, Heche and her mother struggled to make a new life in Chicago.

‘My days were spent in school, my afternoons were spent working at Haagen-Dazs and other places and my evenings were spent holding my mother, who kept crying,’ she told Walters.

‘We lived in a one-room apartment. My mom tried to keep it together, but at night she would break down. I didn’t cry about their deaths until five years later when I moved out.’

Heche’s first real chance at escape happened in 1987 at 17-years-old when she scouted for a soap opera after a high school play performance. She was offered to play twins on the show, ‘Another World.’

‘I couldn’t go. My mother was very religious and maybe she thought it was a sinner’s world.

‘But I got on the phone and said, ‘Send me the ticket. I’m getting on the plane.’ I was like, ‘Bye!’ I did my time with my mom in a one-bedroom, skanky apartment and I was done,’ recalled Heche.

For her work in ‘Another World,’ Heche received a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series in 1991.

Her budding career as a Hollywood leading lady continued throughout the 90s, first with an HBO anthology, ‘If These Walls Could Talk’ starring alongside Cher and Demi Moore.

Then co-starring in a string of box office hits such as ‘Donnie Brasco’ – where she played the ‘thankless role’ of an FBI wife, opposite of Johnny Depp.

That was followed by a string of commercial successes in supporting roles with high profile releases: ‘Volcano,’ ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer,’ and ‘Wag the Dog’ alongside Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman in 1997.

‘I think I, and my sisters, started looking around for a real father in some ways.’

During an upswing in her career, Heche began receiving therapy for her tumultuous childhood. She confronted her mother about the abuse. ‘She hung up the phone on me,’ Heche recalled to Barbara Walters. ‘To have gone through so much work to heal myself and have my mother not acknowledge in any way that she was sorry for what had happened to me broke my heart. And in that moment, I split off from myself.’

During this time, Heche spiraled into moments of madness where she had an alternative personality named Celestia, whom she believed was the reincarnation of God, spoke a different language and had special powers.

Heche met Ellen DeGeneres at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in 1997.

‘I saw the most ravishing woman I had ever seen in my life standing across the room,’ Heche wrote in her memoir. ‘Her name was Ellen DeGeneres. She was radiating. I think at certain times in people’s lives you just radiate an energy and a glow of fabulousness. And that was her. I had never seen anybody so lit up.’

Heche had never been with a woman before the pair went home together and Heche said it ‘was the best sex I’ve ever had.’

In an interview with the Guardian, Heche said that her religious mother did not speak to her after the actress came out. She also said that the her two sisters remained distant from her.

She told the Tampa Bay Times that her mother believed that her lesbian relationship was a ‘sin.’

While Nancy Heche told the Christian Broadcasting Network that she felt her daughter’s relationship with Ellen DeGeneres was ‘Like a betrayal of an unspoken vow: We will never have anything to do with homosexuals.’

In a separate interview, Nancy told Al.com in a 2009 that she felt as though she didn’t handle her daughter coming out in 1997 well. She said: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t know how to deal with it well. God was giving me an opportunity. We had good moments of trying to connect. All of us were learning how to handle it. We loved each other; how do you live out that when you disagree?’

Heche said she was ‘insane’ for 31 years, telling ABC that ‘I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me’

Heche’s mother, Nancy (left) lectured for years on the ‘evils’ of homosexuality following her husband’s death in 1983. Heche’s other sister, Abigail (right) is an Illinois-based jewelry designer. Heche said in an interview that she had rebuilt her relationship with her sister following a years long absence from each other’s lives

Heche pays tribute to her sister, Susan Bergam, who died in 2005 from brain cancer. In 2019, Bergman’s widower, Jud Bergman, was killed at 62 alongside his second wife, Mary Miller-Bergman, when the taxi they were traveling in was hit by a drunk driver. During the crash, Bergman was thrown from the car and died instantly

After a very public breakup with DeGeneres in 2000, Heche suffered a mental breakdown. She also long claimed that she was blacklisted in Hollywood after fallout of her public lesbian romance with the comedian.

‘I was in a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres for three-and-a-half years and the stigma attached to that relationship was so bad that I was fired from my multimillion-dollar picture deal and I did not work in a studio picture for 10 years,’ she told PageSix.

The breakup left her ‘diminished.’ She had dropped down to 90 pounds and said the wakeup call as when she ‘fell out of my face, broke my nose and couldn’t remember my name, but could remember that I had a girlfriend named Ellen DeGeneres. I was lost.’

On 19 August 2000, the day after ending her three-year affair with DeGeneres, a dazed and scantily clad Heche knocked on the door of a stranger’s home in Fresno, California.

She had taken a hit of ecstasy and requested a shower, declared herself to be God and offered to take the children who answered the door back to heaven in her spaceship.

The press pounced, Heche made for good copy. Meanwhile, she suffered a psychotic breakdown and looked destined to never rebound in Hollywood again.

She explained to Larry King how during that time, she relied on the fantasy world she created to escape the abuse she suffered as a child. She said that she spoke to God, whom she called ‘Chunas’ and that they shared a special language.

‘I drove to the desert, still hearing voices of God, thought that I was going to find love on the planet that I was from. And the planet that I was from that was all love was called the Fourth Dimension. And I went to get on my space ship and go there.’

In that same interview she said: ‘I believe that many people may think I went insane.’

‘I do not believe I am insane. I believe I went through a period of my life that was insane, and it lasted 31 years.’ Adding, ‘I wouldn’t even be alive without my insanity,’ the alternate universes provided her the perfect escape.

In a bombshell 2001 interview with Larry King, Heche said: ‘I was a perfect hider. I was raised to hide. I was raised to pretend. I was raised to always tell everybody that everything was fine, and even though I was in therapy for years I never told anybody that I had another personality. I never told anybody that I heard voices and spoke to God. I never told anybody any of it’

Heche poses with her two sons, Atlas (left) and Homer (right). ‘Obviously, the miracle of life for a mother is just dumbfounding,’ she told People following the birth of her second child. ‘It’s so hard to explain how wonderful it is to look in the eyes of a child that you’re blessed with’

Most recently, Heche starred in season 29 of Dancing With The Stars in 2020

Heche described writing her 2001 memoir as a cathartic experience. But her mother Nancy responded by saying: ‘I am trying to find a place for myself in this writing, a place where I as Anne’s mother do not feel violated or scandalized.’

Her sister, Susan, said she objected to not being consulted by Heche about her book.

Abigail Heche, a jewelry designer, said: ‘It is my opinion that my sister Anne truly believes, at this moment, what she has asserted about our father’s past behavior … [but] based on my experience and her own expressed doubts, I believe that her memories regarding our father are untrue.

As a result of her memoir, Heche’s relationship with her mother and sister was fractured and estranged.

More tragedy struck the family in 2006 when Heche’s older sister, Susan Bergman, died at the age of 48 following a battle with brain cancer. Bergman was a well-known writer who lectured at New York University, Northwestern University and the University of Notre Dame.

In 2019, Bergman’s widower, Jud Bergman, was killed at 62 alongside his second wife, Mary Miller-Bergman, when the taxi they were traveling in was hit by a drunk driver. During the crash, Bergman was thrown from the car and died instantly.

In 2001, Heche married Coleman ‘Coley’ Laffoon after reportedly leaving DeGeneres for the cameraman whom she met the previous year on the comedian’s stand-up comedy tour. They had one son named Homer born in 2002, before the couple divorced in 2009.

Heche left Laffoon for her ‘Men in Trees’ co-star James Tupper, with whom she had a son named Atlas in 2009. The couple separated in 2018.

‘Obviously, the miracle of life for a mother is just dumbfounding,’ she told People following the birth of her second child. ‘It’s so hard to explain how wonderful it is to look in the eyes of a child that you’re blessed with.’

In recent years, Nancy Heche downplayed any tension between her and her daughter saying that they have a ‘typical mother-daughter relationship.’ She said: ‘We connect and we don’t connect. That’s pretty typical. I have a growing relationship, a loving relationship with her. I love her.’

Heche admitted in a 2011 interview with the Daily Telegraph that she had recently begun to rebuild her relationship with her sister following a 20-year feud. The ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ star said: ‘She came out to visit last week, and we’re having a wonderful time in our friendship as we’ve gotten closer. We’ve both put our stuff behind us.’

In that interview, Heche said that she was still estranged from her mother. Heche said that when she called her mother to confront her once, she hung up after her mother said: ‘Jesus loves you, Anne.’

Heche said: ‘Forgiveness is a funny word for me. I’m OK with my mother living her life the way she wants to live it, and I’m OK with her not participating in my life the way I want to live it.’

In 2015, Nancy Heche conceded: ‘[Anne has] stopped talking to me. She made the decision to cut off communication.’

Before plowing her car into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood in Los Angeles, Heche first crashed her car into an apartment building in on Friday morning around 11:00 am, she fled that scene and continued driving on the same block before crashing into the second houe. A vodka bottle was spotted in her cupholder, but authorities later confirmed that she had no alcohol in her blood stream, but was high on cocaine

Aerial footage showed her with brutal scarring across her back from the fire after her top appeared to have been shredded by the heat and she writhed across the stretcher in pain

Heche’s car immediately burst into flames. It was reported that she was conscious at the time of rescue but immediately slipped into a coma. She was placed on a ventilator due to ‘significant pulmonary injury’ and was being treated at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital

Heche’s Mini Cooper immediately exploded after careening her car at 90 mph into the home of an unsuspecting woman who was uninjured. The house was completely destroyed in the blaze

On August 5, the actress crashed into a Mar Vista home at 90 mph, causing her vehicle and the house to immediately burst in flames. It took 59 firefighters more than an hour to put out the flames and carefully extract Heche from the wreckage. She was seen writhing in excruciating pain from her injuries.

Heche was immediately placed on a ventilator due to ‘significant pulmonary injury’ and was being treated at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital, where she was put on life support.

Before plowing her car into a home at 1766 South Walgrove Avenue, Heche first crashed her car into an apartment building in Los Angeles on Friday morning around 11:00 am, she fled that scene and continued driving on the same block before crashing into another home.

Heche first crashed her Mini on a garage block, before racing away, plowing through a hedge and ending up fully submerged in Mishele’s home on 1766 South Walgrove Avenue. A photograph taken by onlookers pictured a small bottle of vodka in the cupholder.

Authorities eventually determined that Heche had no alcohol in her system, but was high on cocaine at the time of the accident.

Hours before her horrifying crash, Heche slurred her way through a podcast, saying that she was downing vodka and wine after having ‘a very bad day.’

Her family has chosen to keep her on life support, even though doctors have officially declared the actress brain dead, in order to determine if her organs are healthy enough for donation.

‘It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,’ the statement said.

The actress is survived by both ex husbands, her two sons, her mother and sister. She was allegedly dating celebrity dermatologist, Peter Thomas Roth at the time of her death.

In a statement, the family said: ‘Anne had a huge heart and touched everyone she met with her generous spirit. More than her extraordinary talent, she saw spreading kindness and joy as her life’s work – especially moving the needle for acceptance of who you love. She will be remembered for her courageous honesty and dearly missed for her light.’

As for her one time love, DeGeneres tweeted: ‘This is a sad day. I’m sending Anne’s children, family and friends all of my love.’

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