| BIOGRAPHY
An actress who is known as much for her offscreen life as for
her onscreen performances, Anne Heche had the distinction of being
one of Hollywood's most surprising success stories and also one
half of its most famous lesbian couple. Heche's hyper-publicized
former relationship with actress and comedienne Ellen DeGeneres
was particularly notable -- and refreshing -- for its degree of
openness, something that made the two women veritable poster children
for gay pride in Hollywood and elsewhere.
Born in the small town of Aurora, OH, on May 25, 1969, Heche
was raised as part of a fundamentalist Christian family. Her father,
an itinerant choir director, was constantly running from both
debt and his immediate family; the former was due to his lack
of a steady job and the latter to his secret life as a gay man.
Both conditions resulted in a tumultuous childhood for Heche,
who began performing in dinner theatre at the age of 12 to help
pay her family's bills.
Her life changed dramatically when she was 13 and her father
died of AIDS, something that revealed his other identity and confounded
Heche's entire family. Compounding the tragedy was her brother's
death in a car accident just months later; following this double
blow, Heche lived with her mother in Chicago and kept acting to
help pay the rent. When she was 17, she moved to New York and
was cast as identical twins on the long-running soap opera Another
World; Heche stayed with the show through 1991, earning a Daytime
Emmy Award for her work in the process.
Following her departure from Another World, Heche struggled
in obscurity for a few years, turning up on the occasional TV
show. Her fortunes began to shift in 1996, when she had her breakthrough
film role in Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking, a well-received
independent that co-starred Heche and Catherine Keener as best
friends experiencing various romantic ups and downs.
That same year, she had a supporting role as Demi Moore's best
friend in The Juror and although the film wasn't particularly
successful, it did give Heche greater exposure. Her exposure increased
exponentially when, after appearing in Wag the Dog and as Johnny
Depp's wife in Mike Newell's highly acclaimed Donnie Brasco in
1997, she made public her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres.
Heche's disclosure came directly against the advice of her agents
-- whom she subsequently fired -- and the intense amount of hooplah
surrounding it severely compromised her casting opposite Harrison
Ford in the romantic comedy Six Days Seven Nights. Fortunately,
Ford stood firm on his insistence that Heche star with him in
the film and the actress managed to weather the ridiculous skepticism
voiced by those who doubted a lesbian actress -- one who had made
a career thus far out of portraying blatantly heterosexual women
-- could convincingly play Ford's love interest. Although Six
Days Seven Nights was savaged by most critics and failed to perform
as well as had been expected, Heche earned a number of positive
reviews for her performance, as well as a choice position on many
Hollywood casting lists.
Anne went on to give another strong performance as a lawyer in
Return to Paradise and then landed the much-sought-after role
of Marion Crane in Gus Van Sant's relentlessly publicized 1998
remake of Psycho. The film, which also starred Vince Vaughn as
Norman Bates and Julianne Moore as Lila Crane, turned out to be
a sizable disappointment, and after starring alongside Ed Harris
in the similarly disappointing religious drama The Third Miracle,
Heche decided to try her hand at directing.
She made her directorial debut with Reaching Normal in 1999 and
the following year, wrote and directed a segment of the HBO drama
If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000). Her segment centered on a
lesbian couple willing to do anything to have a baby and starred
Sharon Stone and DeGeneres. That same year, Heche returned to
acting as one of the stars of Auggie Rose, a drama about a man
who gets the opportunity to assume a new identity.
While Heche and DeGeneres chose to amicably part ways in 2000,
their high-profile relationship left an indelible mark on US culture,
helping to usher in an era of increased tolerance toward homosexuals
within mainstream America. Along with the much publicized break-up,
Heche found herself in the news for another reason that year.
Upon having an emotional breakdown, the actress was found on a
stranger's doorstep claiming to be Celestia, the daughter of God.
However, rather than shy from the controversy, Heche chose to
tackle it head-on, documenting the experience in the 2001 autobiography
Call Me Crazy. Capping off a rollercoaster period of her personal
life, Heche married camera-man Coley Lafoon in September of 2001.
|
FILMOGRAPHY
• Gracie's Choice (2005)
• Birth (2004)
• Prozac Nation (2004)
• John Q (2002)
• Auggie Rose (2001)
• The Third Miracle (1999)
• Psycho (1998)
• Return to Paradise (1998)
• Six Days, Seven Nights (1998)
• Wag the Dog (1998)
• Donnie Brasco (1997)
• I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
• Subway Stories (1997)
• Volcano (1997)
• If These Walls Could Talk (1996)
• Pie in the Sky (1996)
• Walking and Talking (1996)
• Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long (1995)
• Girls in Prison (1994)
• Milk Money (1994) |
