US actor Anne Hech was taken off life support on Sunday, nine days after being seriously injured in a car crash, as a match was found to receive her donor organs, a spokesman said.
Heche, 53, was legally dead as of Friday (Aug 12), although she still had a heartbeat and was kept on life support to preserve her organs so they could be donated, her representatives said.
“Ann Hech was peacefully taken off life support,” spokeswoman Holly Baird said.
Hatchey’s Mini Cooper went out of control, crashed into a house and caught fire on August 5, leading to a harrowing hospital stay with increasingly serious messages from her family and representatives.
On Friday, one of her two sons, 19-year-old Homer Lafund, released a statement saying, “My brother Atlas and I lost our mom.”
Heche, who starred in “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” spent decades battling the effects of a troubled childhood and was part of a pioneering same-sex couple in the 1990s.
A 1991 Daytime Emmy Award winner for her portrayal of identical twin sisters on the NBC soap opera Another World, Heche starred in the 1998 adventure comedy Six Days and Seven Nights opposite Harrison Ford and co-starred with Demi Moore and Cher in HBO TV Movie If These Walls Could Talk.
She became one half of Hollywood’s most famous same-sex couple while dating comedian and actress Ellen DeGeneres. Against her studio’s wishes, Heche went public at the 1997 red carpet premiere of the disaster film Vulcan, bringing DeGeneres with her.
The couple were together for more than three years before Hech ended the relationship.
In an interview with entertainment website Page Six in October 2021, Hatch said she had been “blacklisted” by Hollywood because of her relationship with DeGeneres. “I haven’t done a studio painting for 10 years. I got fired from a $10 million picture deal and didn’t see the light of day in a studio picture.’
In 2001, she married cameraman Coleman Lafune. After the couple divorced, Hech began a long-term relationship with actor James Tupper, which ended in 2018.
Ann Celeste Hech was born in Aurora, Ohio on May 25, 1969, the youngest of five children. At 13, she was shocked by her father’s death from AIDS and the discovery that he had a secret same-sex relationship.
Her brother Nathan died three months after her father in a car accident.
Heche said her father raped her as a child, causing her mental health for decades to suffer from frequent fantasies that she was from another planet.
Heche’s mother, Nancy, denied her daughter’s claim that she knew about the sexual abuse, calling it “a lie and blasphemy”, while her sister Abigail said she thought “the memories of our father are untrue”. She said Ann Hech herself questioned her memories of that time.
Later in her career, Heche starred as a senior officer in the Department of Defense Intelligence on NBC’s Brave and appeared on the competition show Dancing with the Stars in late 2020.
