Anne Heche has officially passed away following a tragic car crash last Friday, in which the Emmy Award-winning actress’ car crashed into a home in Mar Vista, California. Attempts were made to revive her as she was kept in a Los Angeles hospital for the past week but were ultimately unsuccessful, leading to Anne Heche being declared dead today, August 12th, at age 53.

Born in 1969 in Aurora, Ohio, Anne Heche would survive a troubled childhood fraught with trauma and her abuse at the hands of her father to receive her very first audition for a role in As The World Turns, a daytime soap opera that first premiered in 1956, when she was just sixteen years old. Anne’s mother would force her to turn down the role in order to finish her high school education, but Anne later accepted a dual role as Vicky Hudson and Marley Love on Another World (1964) and officially started her path to Hollywood stardom.

Anne Heche: A Long and Star-Studded Career

Anne Heche would go on to win a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series for her work on Another World in 1991; that same year, she made her television debut in Murphy Brown (1988). Anne would make her television movie debut in the Hallmark Hall of Fame film O Pioneers! (1992), followed by her silver screen debut in 1993 with Disney’s The Adventures of Huck Finn, where she played Mary Jane Wilks alongside Elijah Wood’s Huckleberry Finn and Laura Bell Bundy’s Susan Wilks.

In 1996, Anne Heche landed a substantial role as Christine Cullen, a college student considering getting an abortion, in If These Walls Could Talk, an HBO TV movie that also starred Demi Moore and Cher. She also starred alongside Catherine Keener in Walking and Talking (1996), which holds the 47th spot on Entertainment Weekly’s “Top 50 Cult Movies”. Anne would also star alongside Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco (1997), followed by a minor role in the slasher thriller I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) alongside Jennifer Love Hewitt. The end of the 1990s would see Anne Heche cast as Robin Monroe in Six Days Seven Nights (1998), where she starred opposite Harrison Ford, followed by a role in Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho and a starring role as Roxane in The Third Miracle (1999).

The late 1990s was also dominated by the reveal of Anne Heche’s relationship with TV personality and later talk show host Ellen DeGeneres; their relationship was made public in 1997, according to TMZ, and ended in 2000 with the beginning of Anne’s relationship with Coleman “Coley” Laffoon.

Anne would make her Broadway debut in 2002 with Proof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama featuring a woman with inherited genius and inherited disease. Anne would receive a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 2004 following her role as Rowena Lawson in the Lifetime movie Grace’s Choice: A Story of Love, as well as a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress in the CBS television film The Dead Will Tell. In the same year, she would star opposite Alec Baldwin in Broadway’s Twentieth Century, where she played Lily Garland opposite Baldwin’s Oscar Jaffe.

In 2006, Anne would begin work on her own series, Men in Trees, a comedy-drama where she starred for two years as Marin Frist, a relationship coach that moves to Alaska after discovering that her husband was cheating on her. Four years later, in 2010, Anne would make a cameo as CEO Pamela Boardman in The Other Guys (2010), starring Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell, Samuel L. Jackson, and Dwayne Johnson. She would also star as seductive insurance agent Joan Ostrowski-Fox in Cedar Rapids (2011).

In 2013, Anne Heche would star alongside James Tupper for the second time in the horror film Nothing Left to Fear (2013), followed by a role opposite Jason Statham in Wild Card (2014). 2016 would see her starring in USA Network’s Dig as Lynn Monahan, the head of an FBI office in Jerusalem, charged with solving an archaeologist’s death, only to uncover a millennia-old conspiracy in the process.

Anne would also star as Defense Intelligence Agency Deputy Director Patricia Campbell in the NBC series The Brave (2017), followed by a 2018 supporting role in Chicago P.D. (2014), also on NBC. In September of 2020, Anne would be featured as a celebrity contestant on Dancing With the Stars.

Anne’s Heche Dead Due to Car Crash

On August 5th, 2022, a recorded video shows Anne Heche’s Mini Cooper speeding down a residential street in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, California; TMZ reports that she committed at least two hit-and-runs before crashing into a residential home and causing the car to catch fire while reportedly under the influence of cocaine and fentanyl, according to the LAPD. The resident of the house was able to escape with only minor injuries, but Anne sustained heavy injuries and was transported to a Los Angeles hospital.

With Anne Heche now dead, the reason behind the car crash is and will likely remain unknown, but her family does have a stated history of mental health issues, and in 1983, Anne’s brother Nathan passed away in a strikingly similar car crash. Two of Anne’s other siblings have also passed away: her sister, Cynthia, passed away in infancy, while her other sister Susan died of brain cancer in 2006.

Anne Hench is survived by ex-girlfriend Ellen DeGeneres, ex-husband Coleman “Coley” Laffoon, and co-star James Tupper, with whom she had two children but separated in 2018. Anne’s son oldest son Homer Laffoon gave Deadline a mournful statement regarding his mother’s death:

Anne Heche’s official cause of death is reported as being an anoxic brain injury or a lack of oxygen to the brain. She was 53 years old.