Anne Heche (1969 to 2022) was an American actress who played Marion Crane in the 1998 Psycho and Joyce Dahmer in My Friend Dahmer.
Quick Specs
| Born | Anne Celeste Heche, May 25, 1969, Aurora, Ohio |
| Died | declared brain dead August 11, 2022, Los Angeles, aged 53 (announced August 12; life support removed August 14) |
| Breakthrough | twins Vicky Hudson and Marley Love on Another World (1987 to 1991) |
| Breakout year | 1997, with Donnie Brasco, Volcano, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Wag the Dog |
| Horror roles | I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Psycho (1998), Nothing Left to Fear (2013), Aftermath (2016), My Friend Dahmer (2017) |
| Stage | Broadway in Proof (2002) and Twentieth Century (2004) |
| Honors | Daytime Emmy, Outstanding Younger Actress (1991); National Board of Review Best Supporting Actress (1997); Tony and Primetime Emmy nominations (2004) |
| Resting place | Hollywood Forever Cemetery |
Who She Is
Anne Celeste Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio, on May 25, 1969, the youngest of five children of Donald Heche and Nancy Heche. Her parents were fundamentalist Christians, and the family switched denominations whenever her father, a choir director, changed church jobs. She later compared the upbringing to being “raised in a cult.” The family moved again and again, lived for a time in an Amish community, and after her father’s get-rich-quick schemes ended in foreclosure and eviction, depended on a church family’s charity. As a girl she sang songs from Annie at a boardwalk hamburger stand to draw customers, and her first paid acting job was at a dinner theater in Swainton, New Jersey, for $100 a week.
Her father died of AIDS-related complications on March 3, 1983, aged 45. He had told the family he had cancer. He had been living as a gay man in New York and kept both that and his diagnosis secret, and the family only learned what AIDS was from a New York Times article about a month before he died. Three months later her brother Nathan, 18, was killed when his car hit a tree. Her sister Cynthia had died as a baby of a heart defect, and her eldest sister, Susan Bergman, died of a brain tumor in 2006.
The family settled in Chicago, in a one-bedroom apartment Anne shared with her mother and her sister Abigail, and she went to the Francis W. Parker School. At 16 a talent scout offered her a part on As the World Turns. She turned it down to finish school.
In her 2001 memoir, Call Me Crazy, Heche wrote that her father had sexually abused her throughout her childhood. That is her account. Her mother denied the claims, calling them “lies and blasphemies,” and Abigail said she believes the memories are untrue while accepting that Anne believes them. Heche was estranged from her mother and sisters for years, and had reconciled with Abigail by 2011.
She married Coleman “Coley” Laffoon in 2001; their son, Homer, was born in 2002, and they divorced in 2009. With her Men in Trees co-star James Tupper she had a son, Atlas, born in 2009; they separated in 2018.
The Work, and What She Did in It
Days after graduating in 1987, over her mother’s objections, she joined the soap Another World as twins, Vicky Hudson and Marley Love. The dual role won her two Soap Opera Digest Awards and, in 1991, the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Younger Actress. She heard about the Emmy while filming the TV movie O Pioneers! in Nebraska, and her reaction was, “Does this mean I’m an actress?” The Parsons School of Design had accepted her, and she picked O Pioneers! over it.
Her first theatrical films were An Ambush of Ghosts and Disney’s The Adventures of Huck Finn, both in 1993. In 1996 she made Walking and Talking, later on Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 Cult Films list, and a segment of If These Walls Could Talk.
Then came 1997. In Donnie Brasco she played Maggie Pistone, the wife holding the family together, and critic Janet Maslin wrote that she did well with what could have been a thankless role. In Volcano she was co-lead as the seismologist Dr. Amy Barnes, and the film grossed $122 million internationally. In I Know What You Did Last Summer she had a small part as Missy Egan, the backwoods loner, and critic Derek Elley singled her out as a “standout.” It was her first real mark on horror. In Wag the Dog she played the presidential aide Winifred Ames, a role first written for a man. The National Board of Review named her Best Supporting Actress for Donnie Brasco and Wag the Dog together.
That same year her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres became public. The Advocate called them “the first gay supercouple.” She had been cast in Six Days, Seven Nights one day before the news broke. In her later memoir, Call Me Anne, she wrote that she never identified as a lesbian and didn’t regard “gay” or “straight” as relevant to her.
Psycho (1998) is her horror centerpiece. In Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock she took Janet Leigh’s role, Marion Crane. The film cost $60 million, grossed $37.1 million worldwide and was poorly reviewed. Maslin, though, found her “refreshingly cast in Marion’s role… almost as demure as Ms. Leigh’s, yet she’s also more headstrong and flirty.” She got a Saturn Award nomination. Her 1998 films, Psycho and Return to Paradise among them, turned out to be the only theatrical releases in which she had a leading role.
She also started directing. She made a self-financed short, Stripping for Jesus (1998), directed the “2000” segment of If These Walls Could Talk 2 with DeGeneres and Sharon Stone, and directed the Reaching Normal segment of On the Edge (2001), adapted from Walter M. Miller Jr.
On August 19, 2000, the day after her breakup with DeGeneres was reported, she drove into Fresno County, left her car near Cantua Creek and walked about a mile and a half in extreme heat, without water, wearing a bra and shorts. She knocked at a ranch house and asked for water, a shower and a movie, and told sheriff’s deputies she was “God, and was going to take everyone back to heaven… in a spaceship.” She said she had taken ecstasy and was briefly admitted for psychiatric care after what was described as a psychotic break. Later she said she had been “insane for the first 31 years of my life,” that she had built a fantasy world called the “Fourth Dimension” and an alter ego called “Celestia” to feel safe, and that she left Celestia behind after that day.
She kept working, without a break, for the next two decades. Her films included Prozac Nation (2001), John Q. (2002), which grossed $102.2 million worldwide, Birth (2004) with Nicole Kidman, Cedar Rapids (2011) and Rampart (2011). She made her Broadway debut in Proof in 2002, and one critic compared her Catherine favorably with Mary-Louise Parker’s and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s. In 2004 she played opposite Alec Baldwin in Twentieth Century and earned a Tony nomination. That year she was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Gracie’s Choice and a Saturn Award for The Dead Will Tell. On TV she led Men in Trees (2006 to 2008) and appeared in Ally McBeal, Everwood and Hung.
Horror kept calling her back. Nothing Left to Fear (2013) was supernatural horror and was panned; one review said its leads “should write apology notes to their fans.” On Save Me (2013) she played a housewife who believes she channels God, and on Syfy’s Aftermath (2016) she was Karen Copeland, a mother in the apocalypse. Her best late performance was Joyce Dahmer, Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother, in My Friend Dahmer (2017), which one critic called “nerve-jangling perfection.” She also made Catfight (2016), where one critic wrote that “Oh and Heche are great here,” and appeared in The Brave, Chicago P.D., The Best of Enemies (2019) and season 29 of Dancing with the Stars.
On August 5, 2022, her Mini Clubman hit an apartment garage and then a Jaguar in Mar Vista, Los Angeles, before crashing 30 feet into a house. It took 59 firefighters 65 minutes to put out the fire, and about 45 minutes to fully free her. The tenant survived with minor injuries but lost everything. Heche had severe burns and smoke inhalation and was in a coma on a ventilator by August 8. On August 11, with an anoxic brain injury, she was not expected to survive, and she was declared brain dead hours later, which is legal death in California. Her family’s announcement on August 12 is the date many outlets use. She was kept on life support so her organs could be donated, as she had wished, and on August 14, after an honor walk, she was taken off it. The Los Angeles County coroner concluded that she was not impaired at the time of the crash.
Several films came out after her death, including Girl in Room 13, which is dedicated to her, and Supercell (2023), and her second memoir, Call Me Anne, submitted days before her death, was announced for January 2023.
Cool Verified Facts
- She found out she had won a Daytime Emmy while already on the set of a prestige TV movie, and asked, “Does this mean I’m an actress?”
- Her Wag the Dog role, presidential aide Winifred Ames, was written for a man.
- Derek Elley’s review of I Know What You Did Last Summer picked out her small part as a “standout.”
- She turned down As the World Turns at 16 to finish school.
- Her last screen performance was slated to be Wildfire: The Legend of the Cherokee Ghost Horse.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- Two people in one. Her career began with twins, and that doubleness recurs: the public-private split of 1997 to 2000, the “Celestia” she said she built to survive, and late roles as women at war with their own surfaces, like the God-channeling housewife of Save Me and Joyce Dahmer. That’s this page’s reading, not a method she described.
- Mothers in horror. Her late genre work cast her as mothers, not victims: a mother in the apocalypse in Aftermath and Dahmer’s mother in My Friend Dahmer.
- The career didn’t stop. The story that she vanished after 2000 doesn’t fit the record: Broadway, a Tony nomination, an Emmy nomination and two decades of steady screen work. What narrowed was studio leading roles.
Why She Matters
Heche’s place in horror is specific. She took Janet Leigh’s role in one of the most argued-over remakes ever made, the shot-for-shot Psycho, and came out of its bad reviews with Janet Maslin on her side. A year earlier she had been the standout in I Know What You Did Last Summer, one of the films that relaunched the slasher. Beyond horror, her career shows what visibility cost in the 1990s. She won a Daytime Emmy at 22 and had a four-film breakout year at 28, then her career was reshaped in public when she became half of what The Advocate called the first gay supercouple. She spent the next 20 years rebuilding it on stage and television, and her final decade gave horror a mother in the apocalypse and a chilling Joyce Dahmer.