American actress Anne Heche will be taken off artificial respiration on Sunday, nine days after she was seriously injured in a massive car accident, when a match was found to receive her donated organs, a spokesman said.
Heche, 53, had been legally dead as of Friday, though still with a heartbeat, and was being kept on life support to preserve her organs so they could be donated, spokeswoman Holly Baird said.
The actress lost control of the Mini Cooper she was driving, crashing into a house and bursting into flames on August 5.
Heche, who starred in the films “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” struggled for decades with the aftermath of a troubled childhood and was part of a groundbreaking same-sex couple in the years 90.
Winner of an Emmy Award in 1991 for her roles as identical twin sisters on the NBC soap opera “Another World,” Heche starred in the 1998 adventure comedy “Six days, seven nights” with Harrison Ford (NYSE: F ) and acted opposite Demi Moore and Cher in the HBO TV movie “If these walls could talk”
Along with comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres, he formed the most famous same-sex couple in Hollywood at the time. Against her studio’s wishes, Heche publicly came out on the red carpet of the disaster movie “Volcano” in 1997, bringing DeGeneres as her sidekick.
The couple was together for more than three years before Heche ended their relationship.
In an interview with entertainment website Page Six in October 2021, Heche said that she was “blacklisted” by Hollywood due to her relationship with DeGeneres. “I didn’t do a studio film for 10 years. I got fired from a $10 million photography contract and didn’t see the light of day on a studio film.”
In 2001, she married Coleman Laffoon, a cameraman. After the couple divorced, Ella Heche began a relationship with actor James Tupper that ended in 2018.
Anne Celeste Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio, on May 25, 1969, the youngest of five children. At 13, she was shocked by the death of her father from AIDS and the revelation that she had secretly had homosexual relationships.
“He completely denied it until the day he died,” Heche told CNN’s Larry King in 2001. In 1998, he said his death taught him that the most important thing in life is to tell the truth.
His brother Nathan died three months after their father in a car accident.
Heche said her father raped her as a child, which caused 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 launch 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 get the crazy out of me,” he said.
Heche’s mother, Nancy, denied her daughter’s claim that she knew of the sexual abuse, calling it “lies and blasphemy”, and her sister Abigail has said she believes the “memories regarding our father are false”. According to what she said, Anne Heche herself had questioned her memories of that time.
Later in her career, Heche played a senior member of the Defense Intelligence Agency on the NBC television series “The brave” and appeared on the show “Dancing with the stars” in late 2020.
Heche is survived by her two sons, Atlas and Homer.
