(Reuters) – LOS ANGELES, Aug 14 (Reuters) – According to a spokeswoman for her family, American actress Anne Heche was taken off life support on Sunday, nine days after suffering catastrophic injuries in a terrible car accident. This occurred as a result of the identification of a suitable recipient for her donated organs.
Heche, 53, had been declared legally dead since Friday, but she could still feel her heartbeat. According to her representatives, she was kept on life support to preserve her organs for donation.
Anne Heche’s spokesman, Holly Baird, announced in a statement that “Anne Heche has been gently taken off life support.”
On August 5, Heche’s Mini Cooper lost control, collided with a house, and caught fire. This resulted in an agonizingly long hospital stay, during which her family and representatives sent increasingly ominous messages.
On Friday, one of her two sons, Homer Laffoon, 19, issued a statement saying, “My brother Atlas and I have lost our Mom.”
Heche, who appeared in films such as “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog,” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” struggled for decades with the effects of a traumatic childhood and was part of a groundbreaking same-sex partnership in the 1990s. In 2016, Heche passed away.
Heche, who won a Daytime Emmy in 1991 for her roles as identical twin sisters in the NBC soap opera “Another World,” went on to co-star in the adventure comedy “Six Days Seven Nights” with Harrison Ford in 1998. She also appeared alongside Demi Moore and Cher in the HBO TV movie “If These Walls Could Talk.”
They were one-half of Hollywood’s most famous same-sex couples at the time when they were together. Her girlfriend at the time was actress and comedian Ellen DeGeneres. In defiance of her production company’s demands, Heche made her public debut at the red carpet premiere of the disaster film “Volcano” in 1997, with DeGeneres as her date.
After being together for more than three years, Heche decided to end their romantic relationship.
In an interview with the entertainment website Page Six in October 2021, Heche stated that she was “blacklisted” by Hollywood because she was romantically involved with DeGeneres. “I hadn’t done a studio shoot in ten years. I was let go from a $10 million film deal, and my performance was never used in a studio-produced film.”
In the year 2001, she married Coleman Laffoon, a cameraman. Following the dissolution of their marriage, Heche formed a committed relationship with actor James Tupper, which lasted until 2018.
Anne Celeste Heche was the fifth and final child, and the youngest of the five, when she was born on May 25, 1969, in Aurora, Ohio. She was taken aback by both the news that her father had secret gay connections and the fact that he died of AIDS when she was only 13 years old.
Heche stated in an interview with CNN’s Larry King in 2001 that “he was in utter denial until the day he died.” In 1998, she stated that his death had taught her that telling the truth is the most important thing a person can do in their lifetime.
Three months after their father was killed, Nathan was killed in a car accident.
Heche claimed that her father sexually abused her as a child, causing her to suffer from mental health issues for many years afterward, including recurring delusions that she was from another planet.
“I’m not crazy,” Heche told ABC News in 2001, at the time of the publication of her memoir “Call Me Crazy: A Memoir.”
“But living here is an adventure. It took me 31 years to overcome the insanity instilled in me as a child by my insane family.”
Nancy Heche, Heche’s mother, has called her daughter’s claim that she knew about the sexual abuse “lies and blasphemies.” Furthermore, Heche’s sister, Abigail, has stated that the “memories surrounding our father are false.” She claimed that Anne Heche had questioned her memory of what happened during that period.
Heche went on to play a senior member of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the NBC television series “The Brave” later in her career. She also appeared on the reality competition show “Dancing With the Stars” in late 2020.
