Actor Anne Heche dead at 53 after taken off life support

Anne Heche, the Emmy-winning film and television actor whose dramatic Hollywood rise in the 1990s and accomplished career contrasted with personal chapters of turmoil, died of injuries from a fiery car crash. She was 53.

Spokeswoman Holly Baird said Sunday night that Heche had "been peacefully taken off life support."

Heche had been considered legally dead under California law since Friday, though she still had a heartbeat and was kept on life support to preserve her organs so they could be donated, Baird said.

Under current California law, death can be determined by the loss of all brain function and in accordance with accepted medical standards.

Heche's Mini Cooper sped out of control, plowed into a house and burst into flames on Aug. 5.

Heche, who starred in the movies Donnie Brasco, Wag The Dog and I Know What You Did Last Summer, struggled for decades with the fallout from a troubled childhood and was part of a groundbreaking same-sex couple in the 1990s.

Winner of a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991 for her roles as identical twin sisters in the NBC soap opera Another World, Heche starred in the 1998 adventure comedy Six Days Seven Nights with Harrison Ford and played alongside Demi Moore and Cher in the HBO TV movie If These Walls Could Talk.

She became one half of Hollywood's most famous same-sex couple at the time when she dated comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres.

Against the wishes of her studio, Heche came out publicly at the 1997 red carpet premiere for disaster flick Volcano, taking DeGeneres along as her date.

The pair were together for more than three years before Heche ended the relationship.

In an interview with Page Six entertainment website in October 2021, Heche said she was "blacklisted" by Hollywood because of her relationship with DeGeneres.

Heche's delicate, elfin look belied her strength on screen. When she won the National Board of Review's 1997 best supporting actress award, the board cited the one-two punch of Donnie Brasco and the political satire Wag the Dog, in which Heche portrayed a cynical White House aide and held her own against film great Robert De Niro.

Heche also called effectively on her apparent fragility. In 2002 she starred on Broadway in the play Proof as a woman fearful of losing her sanity just like her father, a brilliant mathematics professor. An Associated Press review praised her "touching performance, vulnerable yet funny, particularly when Catherine mocks the suspicions about her mental stability."

"I didn't do a studio picture for 10 years. I was fired from a $10 million picture deal and did not see the light of day in a studio picture."