Anne Heche Biography

Despite her many fine performances, actress Anne Heche remains better known as the former lover of comedian Ellen DeGeneres, for her highly publicized mental breakdown in 2000, and for the fiery crash that killed her in 2022.

Anne Heche got her start on TV as a teen, ultimately winning a Daytime Emmy in 1991 for her portrayal of good/evil twins in the soap opera Another World. She played supporting roles in feature films throughout the 1990s, including parts in Donnie Brasco (1997, with Johnny Depp) and the political satire Wag the Dog (1997, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro).

She moved into lead roles in the island romcom adventure Six Days Seven Nights (1998, with Harrison Ford) and in Gus Van Sant‘s remake of Psycho (1998). But her screen career was overshadowed by her personal life after she announced that she and TV star Ellen DeGeneres were in love. A publicly lesbian couple was still a rarity in those days, and they became one of Hollywood’s most famous couples until their breakup in 2000.

Soon after, Heche was found on a farm near Fresno, California, under the influence of drugs and claiming that she was “Celestia” and was waiting for a spaceship to take her to heaven. In her 2001 memoir Call Me Crazy, Heche explained Celestia as an alter-ego created as a defense against bad childhood memories (including some incidents her family adamantly denied).

In spite of the offscreen melodrama, Heche continued to work in films like John Q (2002, starring Denzel Washington) and Birth (2004). From 2006-07 she starred as a relationship coach who settles in Alaska in the TV series Men In Trees. She continued to act until her death, appearing in films like the romance What Love Is (2007), the horror film Nothing Left to Fear (2013), and the kidnapped-child thriller The Vanished (2020). Also in 2020, she appeared in the 29th season of the TV series Dancing With the Stars.

Anne Heche was severely injured in a single-car auto accident on August 5, 2022, when her car crashed into a house in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles and burst into flames. Heche had been acting erratically before the crash, which left her comatose and in critical condition. A week later, her family said that she had suffered brain death — the legal definition of death in California — though her heart was being kept pumping artificially so that her organs could be donated.