Long before the automobile crash that led to the actress Anne Heche being declared brain-dead on the age of 53, her work onscreen was all the time on the verge of being overshadowed by tabloid interest in her life.
In 1997, she became best often known as the girlfriend of the comedian Ellen DeGeneres, appearing along with her on red carpets at a time when open same-sex relationships were still rare in Hollywood. Her name was the butt of countless jokes after a “20/20” interview with Barbara Walters in 2001 wherein she revealed that she had concocted a separate world for herself called a “fourth dimension” and a personality named “Celestia.” Never mind the undeniable fact that she also told Walters concerning the horrific sexual abuse she had endured by the hands of her father. She was faced with mockery that followed her for the remainder of her profession.
But to filmgoers, Heche was an idiosyncratic presence who never quite appeared to fit into cookie-cutter blockbusters. As an alternative, she was brilliantly unnerving and incessantly very funny, her angular face a disarming mixture of intelligence and wiliness that made her the right alternative to play competent women in extreme situations.
In some ways, she operated in probably the most mainstream arenas of the entertainment industry. She got her start as a soap opera star on “One other World” and did stints on network dramas like “Ally McBeal” and sitcoms like “Save Me” and “The Michael J. Fox Show.” And yet there was a subversiveness to Heche that threaded through her best performances, in addition to a capability to laugh at herself that undermined her status within the culture at large.
Early in her profession, the director Nicole Holofcener identified Heche’s capability for honesty within the 1996 “Walking and Talking” (available to rent on Prime Video). Heche plays Laura, a therapist-in-training and the longtime best friend of Catherine Keener’s Amelia. Laura is, theoretically, the more together of the 2. While Amelia flounders, Laura is on a direct path, engaged to be married to her sweet jewelry-designer boyfriend (Todd Field).
But as Amelia becomes jealous of the understanding in Laura’s life, doubt creeps into Laura’s psyche. In Heche, you may see Laura bristling on the restraints that include the comforts of an in depth friendship and good relationship. As she tries on wedding dresses, Heche’s skin turns flushed amid the layers of tulle. Laura wrestles with the material as Amelia evenly paws at it, not helping much, as she describes her date with a person that they had each mocked. Laura doesn’t say it, but you may tell she’s thoroughly overwhelmed. She grabs her rear end. “I’m farting,” she says, with resignation. In that little gesture, Heche admits that her body is betraying her before her mind will allow her to say so.
Holofcener’s screenplay allows this easy intimacy between women who’ve known one another for a long time, but in Heche’s hands, Laura’s soul-searching becomes something hilariously palpable. When she and Amelia finally have it out, Heche never allows her character’s exasperation to fade into bitterness. As an alternative she finds all of the wonderful nuances of a disagreement with a confidante, love still the dominant emotion.
In the next yr, Hollywood wrestled with the right way to fit Heche into its formulas. She appeared in 4 movies in 1997, in roles starting from the frustrated wife of an undercover cop in “Donnie Brasco,” opposite Johnny Depp, to a presidential aide attempting to bury a scandal in “Wag the Dog,” opposite Robert De Niro. In the teenager slasher “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” she’s the sister of a murder victim. She is oddly slotted into the goofy thrills of the disaster flick “Volcano,” wherein she plays the seismologist who figures out that Los Angeles is about to be overtaken by lava. And yet even within the silliest of blockbusters, spouting ludicrous exposition about just how this geological event is happening in a serious American city, she brings a simple truth to the circumstances that the majority performers would struggle to realize. (“Donnie Brasco” is out there on Netflix; “I Know What You Did” is on HBO Max; and “Wag” and “Volcano” are on most major platforms.)
She never stopped working, however the Anne Heche offscreen soon began to overshadow the Anne Heche on. Still, there have been artists, like Jonathan Glazer, who recognized what she could bring to a project. He tapped her for a pivotal role in his surreal 2004 film, “Birth” (HBO Max), wherein Nicole Kidman plays an Upper East Side bride-to-be visited by a young boy who claims to be her dead husband reincarnated. During considered one of the opening scenes, Heche is disconcertingly on edge, balking before entering a celebration and as an alternative going to bury her gift within the woods, then rushing to a store to interchange what she hid, eyes flooded with guilt. Her character hovers across the motion like a threat, until she snaps into focus, the true purpose of her existence floating into her intense gaze.
“Birth” is an otherworldly piece, and it’s almost as if Glazer uses Heche to further unsettle the audience, a task she takes on with vigor. Greater than 10 years later, Onur Tukel tapped into Heche’s rage in “Catfight” (Netflix), a comedy that solid her as an artist who gets right into a vicious punching match with a university friend (Sandra Oh) over resentment and sophistication conflict.
There was a likelihood that Heche was on the verge of one more profession revival. She had finished a job within the forthcoming HBO series “The Idol,” created by the musician the Weeknd, Sam Levinson of “Euphoria” and Reza Fahim. For all of the questions on what opportunities she may not have gotten — due to homophobia or ridicule or mental health stigmas — in an interview with Los Angeles magazine across the time of the discharge of “Birth” she explained, “It’s funny, it’s not necessarily the profession I had before, however it’s the life I would like.”
It will be easy to let the circumstances of her crash cloud the memory of her artistry, however it’s just as easy to picture her as Laura in “Walking and Talking,” hair stuffed with flowers and heart stuffed with nerves, heading to her wedding along with her best friend.
