US actress Anne Heche was taken off life support on Sunday, nine days after she was seriously injured in a car accident, and died 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 kept alive to preserve her organs so they could be donated, the representative said.
Heche’s Mini Cooper spun out of control, crashed into a house and caught fire 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 consequences of a troubled childhood and was part of a groundbreaking same-sex couple in the 1990s.
Winner of a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991 for her role 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 and starred opposite Demi Moore and Cher in the HBO TV Movie “If These Walls Could Talk.”
He became one half of Hollywood’s most famous same-sex couple when he dated comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres. Against her studio’s wishes, Heche publicly appeared at the 1997 red carpet premiere for the disaster movie “Volcano,” bringing DeGeneres as her date.
The couple was together for more than three years before Heche ended the relationship.
In an interview with entertainment website Page Six in October 2021, Heche said that she was “blacklisted” by Hollywood because of her relationship with DeGeneres. “I didn’t do a studio movie for 10 years. I got fired from a $10 million contract and didn’t see the light of day on a studio movie.”
In 2001 she married Coleman Laffoon, a cameraman. After the couple divorced, Ella Heche began a long-term 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 age 13, she was shocked by the death of her father from AIDS and the revelation that she had secretly had homosexual relationships.
“He was in complete denial until the day he died,” Heche told CNN’s Larry King in 2001. He said in 1998 that 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, leading to mental health problems for decades, including frequent fantasies that she was from another planet.
“I’m not crazy,” Heche told ABC News in 2001 about the release 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.”
Heche’s mother, Nancy, denied her daughter’s claim that she knew about the sexual abuse, calling it “lies and profanity”, and her sister Abigail has said she believes “the memories about our father are not true”. She said that Anne Heche had cast doubt on her own memories of that time.
Later in her career, Heche played a high-ranking member of the US Defense Intelligence Agency on the NBC television series “The Brave” and appeared on the competition show “Dancing With The Stars” in late of 2020.
Heche is survived by her two sons, Atlas and Homer.
(Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta and Alistair Bell; Editing by Diane Craft)