Actor Anne Heche dead at 53 after being taken off life support and organ recipient found

Actor Anne Heche was taken off life support on Sunday, nine days after suffering severe injuries in a fiery car crash, and has died as a compatible person was found to receive her donated organs, a spokesperson said.

Heche, 53, was considered legally dead since Friday — though still with a heartbeat — and was kept on life support to preserve her organs so they could be donated, the representative 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. “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.”

In 2001, she married Coleman Laffoon, a cameraman. After the couple divorced, Heche began a long-term relationship with actor James Tupper which ended in 2018.

Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio, on May 25, 1969, and was the youngest of five children. At age 13, she was shocked by her father’s death from AIDS and from the revelation that he had had secret gay relationships.

“He was in complete denial until the day he died,” Heche told CNN’s Larry King in 2001. She said in 1998 that his death taught her that the most important thing in life is to tell the truth.

Her brother Nathan died three months after their father in a car crash.

Heche said her father raped her as a…