Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,082

This is the grave of Anne Heche.

Born in 1969 in Aurora, Ohio, Heche grew up in the kind of world that can make someone have a lot of issues–hardcore fundamentalist Christianity. Her parents were total right-wing religious nutters, moving around a lot, deeply involved in get rich quick schemes, basically the kind of people who pray for wealth, hate a lot of other people, treat their children like garbage, and are total weirdos. Heche later said it was like a cult. What kept the family going was her father being a good musician and getting jobs at choir directors in whatever church they found themselves in.

Well, the performative aspect of going up in loony tunes Christian world can translate to other parts of life and it sure did for Heche. She got out of her parents house as soon as possible. Their marriage was falling apart anyway and the house was foreclosed upon, and it was bad. They were in Atlantic City by this time and the teenage Heche was working teenage jobs, but she sang a lot during them (like working fast food) and people seemed to like it. Her father was a closeted homosexual through all of this and died of AIDS. Heche had a much older sister named Susan who later became a well-known scholar of religion and who wrote about their father. But Susan also provided a model to get out and get into the real world. Susan’s children later formed the band Wild Belle, which got pretty big in the mid-10s.

Anyway, Heche moved to New York and enjoyed performing, so she started trying out and she did well very quickly. She got a good role on the soap opera Another World in 1987 and stayed in that role until 1991. She won a Daytime Emmy for portraying twins (oh soap operas). She was ambitious for something more than the endless grind of the soap opera, not to mention the typecasting. So she started getting film roles. At first these were pretty small, beginning with Stephen Sommers’ 1993 adaptation of The Adventures of Huck Finn, more notable for starring a very young Elijah Wood. But by the mid 90s, she was rising fast. She had a good role in Mike Newell’s 1997 film Donnie Brasco, which I should probably rewatch. Haven’t seen that in ages. She was the second listed star in 1997’s Mick Jackson disaster thriller Volcano, just behind Tommy Lee Jones. That same year, she had a strong supporting role in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog, a film with too much relevance to how the Trump administration operates.

So by the late 90s, Heche maybe wasn’t quite a huge star just through her acting, but she was pretty close to it. She continued to get solid roles for the next few years, including Gus Van Sant’s strange shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. This was about as far as she was going to get though. Her career began to stall out, as it does for so many actors. Now, she still worked, so she was fine. But she was never going to be Susan Sarandon or Meryl Streep or someone at that level. She did a lot of TV shows in the 21st century. She directed a lot of TV shows too, which was evidently a career choice on her part that certainly kept her working. She even did some theater and in fact was nominated for a Tony in 2004’s Twentieth Century. She was also nominated for an Emmy in 2004 for her work in a TV movie called Gracie’s Choice.

But what Heche really became known for was her wild and increasingly out of control personal life. She and Ellen DeGeneres became a couple in 1997. This was a huge deal. DeGeneres of course was one of the most prominent comedians in the country at that time and famously came out on her own TV show. It’s incredible to imagine how controversial that was at the time. Meanwhile, Heche was right there with her, making them the first openly and very high-profile lesbian couple in American entertainment. So that’s groundbreaking right there. Some accused her of being a parasite on DeGeneres. She had dated plenty of famous men before this, including Lindsey Buckingham and Steve Martin. I think that’s unfair, but the relationship was a disaster. DeGeneres tried to get her mental health, but Heche resisted that.

Heche finally left DeGeneres for a man in 2000. Almost right after that, she suffered a breakdown, driving her car in the middle of nowhere wearing only her underwear, accepting health from someone who was like “what the hell is Anne Heche doing at my house in her underwear?” and finally accepting help from the police. This was in Fresno, so you know things were bad already just because that’s where she was. The rest of her life would consist of episodes like this on and off. She married a man and had a son, though that marriage failed too. There were a lot of drugs involved, unsurprisingly. She later claimed her father had sexuallly abused her, which is entirely possible as her older sisters also believed that. In any case, her mental state was extremely unstable, even when she was working. She also accused Harvey Weinstein of demanding oral sex from her. That, I assume, is absolutely true.

Heche actually did get a decent amount of work late in life, mostly on TV. That included Everwood, a WB show on in 2004-2005, Men in Trees, an ABC show from 2006-08, and The Brave, an NBC show on in 2017-18. Of course she ended up on washed up celebrity reality shows, particularly a season on Dancing with the Stars, which seems utterly beyond unwatchable.

Things ended predictably badly for Heche. In 2022, she had some kind of a psychotic break and had her car as a weapon. This is never good. She was in LA and she started causing car crashes. It’s a bit hard to say what happened exactly. The first was anodyne enough, as far as these things go. She hit the garage in an apartment complex and then drove off while someone yelled at her to stop and get out of the car. So maybe she panicked, though that’s such a small thing. But then I’m not a celebrity with a history. Then she hit another car and drove off. That’s certainly not good. Then she rammed her car into a house at a high rate of speed, causing a fire, which caused massive burns on her body. She was still somewhat alert when she was rescued, but died a few days later. Yikes. Heche was 53 years old.

Anne Heche is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.

Most of the people Heche worked with are still alive, but if you want this series to visit some she worked with who have died, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Tom Aldredge, who was in a film version of O Pioneers with Heche that I don’t remember at all (starring Jessica Lange) is in Kettering, Ohio. Jason Robards, who was in that version of The Adventures of Huck Finn, is in Fairfield, Connecticut. Previous posts are archived here and here.