The actress Anne Heche remained in a coma and was not expected to survive the injuries she sustained in a automobile crash last week, in accordance with a press release that her publicist released Thursday night on behalf of her family and friends.
Ms. Heche, 53, was critically injured on Aug. 5 when she crashed the Mini Cooper she was driving right into a home within the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, the authorities said. She suffered a severe anoxic brain injury and was being treated on the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital, the family statement said.
“It has long been her alternative to donate her organs and she or he is being kept on life support to find out if any are viable,” the statement said.
The crash began a fireplace that took 59 firefighters greater than an hour to extinguish, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Ms. Heche was the one person within the automobile, the authorities said.
Jeff Lee, a public information officer with the Los Angeles Police, said an initial blood sample drawn from Ms. Heche on the hospital had revealed “the presence of medication” but didn’t say what kind. He said a second test was needed to rule out any substances administered by hospital staff but those results could take “weeks.”
In 1991, Ms. Heche won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding younger actress in a drama series, for enjoying good and evil twins on the NBC soap opera “One other World.”
She starred in several popular Hollywood movies within the late Nineties, including “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog” and “Six Days Seven Nights.” She continued to have television roles, including on “Men in Trees” in 2006 and “Hung” in 2009, and performed on Broadway, starring in “Proof” in 2002 and “Twentieth Century” in 2004, for which she received a Tony nomination.
In his review of “Twentieth Century,” Ben Brantley of The Times wrote of Ms. Heche’s portrayal of Lily Garland, “Her posture melting between serpentine seductiveness and a street fighter’s aggressiveness, her voice shifting between supper-club velvet and dime store vinyl, Ms. Heche summons a complete gallery of studio-made sirens from the Depression era: Jean Harlow, the pre-mummified Joan Crawford and, yes, Carole Lombard, who famously portrayed Lily in Howard Hawks’s screen version of ‘Twentieth Century.’”‘
She has several projects which are in postproduction, in accordance with IMDb, including “Supercell,” a movie with Alec Baldwin, and the HBO show “The Idol.” She had recently finished filming on “Girl in Room 13,” a Lifetime movie that’s scheduled to premiere in September, Variety reported.
Mike Ives and Remy Tumin contributed reporting.
