Anne Heche's tumultuous childhood began on May 25, 1969, when she was born in Aurora, Ohio, into the fundamentalist Christian family of Nancy Abigail (Prickett) and Donald Joseph Heche. She has Swiss, German, Norwegian, and British Isles ancestry. Her father was an itinerant Baptist minister and choir director who relocated his family yearly in search of work. It was not until 1983 when it was discovered that he had, in actuality, been holding down a double life as a homosexual businessman. Heche lived in several towns in Ohio and in Atlantic City, NJ among other places, while enduring what she claimed was a painful and loveless childhood that included sexual abuse by her father. Heche admittedly retreated into her own fantasy land to escape, standing out with her childhood forays into acting. Before long, though, her family's desperate financial situation necessitated that everyone do their share to bring home the rent, and 12-year-old Heche obliged after landing her first professional acting job at a New Jersey dinner theater. The following year, her father was diagnosed with the then-rare disease AIDS, and his secretive lifestyle was disclosed on his deathbed. Heche's only brother was tragically killed in a car accident weeks later.
Heche and her mother made a new start in Chicago, IL where Heche was active in high school theater and was even courted by an agent to audition for a role on As the World Turns (1956). The 16-year-old was flown to New York City and offered a job, but she did not want to uproot her barely stabilized family again, so she opted to stay and finish high school. Less than two years later, Heche went back to New York where she landed her first major TV role, that of good and evil twins Vicky and Marley on the NBC soap opera Another World (1964). Heche made quite an impression with the complicated dual role, earning Daytime Emmy and Soap Opera Digest Awards, though off-screen she was becoming completely unraveled. She had begun therapy to try to make some sense of her childhood and uncovered haunting memories of sexual abuse, causing her behavior to grow more erratic. Heche taped her final episode of "As the World Turns" in 1992 and the following year made a significant TV film debut alongside Jessica Lange in the Golden Globe-nominated adaptation of Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1992).
Perhaps her fracturing real-life personality lent an interesting perspective to her acting craft, but whatever it was, Heche was undoubtedly a true talent. Off-screen she embraced a second personality that claimed to be from another dimension and able to talk to the dead and heal the sick. Onscreen, she made her feature debut as Mary Jane Wilks in Les aventures de Huckleberry Finn (1993) and gradually landed larger roles in I'll Do Anything (1994) and TV movies Les révoltés d'Attica (1994) and Kingfish: La vie de Huey P. Long (1995), playing the notorious Southern politician's mistress. Her breakthrough role was that of a doctor friend of Demi Moore who falls victim to a hit man in the thriller La jurée (1996). She went on to co-star with Catherine Keener in the acclaimed indie Walking and Talking (1996) before giving an exceptional performance opposite Johnny Depp as the long-suffering wife of Donnie Brasco (1997), an FBI agent whose intensely guarded job as a mafia infiltrator threatens to destroy his own life and family. Heche then teamed with Tommy Lee Jones in the disaster flick Volcano (1997) and continued her rise with a well-reviewed turn as a presidential advisor in Barry Levinson's political satire Des hommes d'influence (1997).
Heche's well-deserved attention for her 1997 performances was overshadowed by bigger news that year; news that she and comedienne Ellen DeGeneres were in love. The news came hot on the heels of DeGeneres' public admission of her own sexuality and the groundbreaking episode of her sitcom Ellen (1994) in which her lead character also came out. Prior to this, Heche had been romantically linked to her male co-stars, including a two-year relationship with Steve Martin, so even gay community supporters were left scratching their heads. Meanwhile, the actress had just landed a co-starring role with Harrison Ford in the romantic adventure 6 jours, 7 nuits (1998), and producers hoped that Heche's updated sexual status would not compromise the audiences' ability to accept her in a heterosexual role, especially after her every move with DeGeneres began being chronicled by the press and paparazzi.
Unfortunately, "Six Days" itself failed to bring in audiences, as did Loin du paradis (1998), in which she co-starred as a lawyer opposite Vince Vaughn. Meanwhile, she and DeGeneres morphed into poster children of the gay community, causing a commotion on the red carpet that rivaled that of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. They also announced that they would be getting married in Vermont, where it was soon to become legal for same sex couples to do so. Due no doubt in part to her personal life, Heche's feature career cooled a bit from her whirlwind of the previous year. Her portrayal of Marion Crane (again opposite Vaughn as Norman Bates) in Gus Van Sant's lambasted shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1998) did not help matters. In 1999, she played the skeptical daughter of a woman proposed as a candidate for sainthood in The Third Miracle (1999) while rumors persisted that she was the model for the ruthlessly ambitious actress played by Heather Graham in ex-beau Steve Martin's comedy Bowfinger, roi d'Hollywood (1999). Heche wrote and directed the "2000" segment of the Emmy-nominated HBO movie Sex révélations (2000), an anthology about the lesbian experience in America, in a piece starring DeGeneres and Sharon Stone as a couple trying to have a baby. For the pair's second creative collaboration, Heche accompanied DeGeneres on a comedy tour as the director of Ellen De Generes: American Summer Documentary (2001). It was on this tour that she met a cameraman Coleman 'Coley' Laffoon.
Before the film was released, however, the power lesbian couple called it quits, reportedly devastating DeGeneres for a very long time. Days after moving out of their shared home, Heche was picked up by police in a rural area of California's Central valley, where she was found wandering in a confused state claiming to be looking for a spaceship that was supposed to be meeting her. Later in the year, Heche released the hastily written memoir Call Me Crazy in which she explained that the event was the culmination of many years of living with a second personality, Celestia, and attempting to process her childhood abuse by finding love and security. Heche claimed that following the experience and single day on a mental ward, she literally snapped out of it, put her alter ego behind her, and resumed her life with new clarity. In a further unexpected twist - and one that alienated her legions of gay supporters - Heche married her cameraman beau, Laffoon within the year and became pregnant with their child.
The press eventually settled down from the field day of Heche's personal journey, and her career got back on track surprisingly quickly. She had a featured role in the Denzel Washington thriller John Q (2002) and also played Dr. Sterling in the long-delayed adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel's bestseller Prozac Nation (2001). Television writer-producer David E. Kelley cast her in a recurring role on the hit Ally McBeal (1997) as the eccentric, Tourette's-addled soul-mate of John Cage (Peter MacNicol) during the 2000-01 season. Following the birth of her son, Homer, in 2002, Heche replaced Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "Proof" on Broadway. In 2004, the resilient actress received an Emmy nomination for playing a drug-addicted mother who neglects her children in the Lifetime movie Le choix de Gracie (2004). She also appeared in a recurring role on the drama Everwood (2002) before returning to Broadway where she was nominated for a Tony Award for a revival of the showbiz-themed comedy "Twentieth Century," starring opposite Alec Baldwin.
Clearly, by the time she took on a recurring role on Nip/Tuck (2003) in 2005 as an ex-mob wife and Witness Protection Program subject who requires plastic surgery, Heche had reclaimed a great deal of her once-tarnished professional luster. By next fall, she was headlining her own prime time show, ABC's quirky comedy-drama Men in Trees (2006) where she starred as a transplanted New York author living in small town Alaska which happens to be abundant with single men and few women. The show was well-received by critics and Heche was singled out for her charming performance, a performance that also charmed hunky co-star James Tupper, with whom Heche began a romance following the breakup of her marriage to Laffoon in 2006, who filed for divorce from Heche in February, 2007, claiming the affair began prior to their divorce. The split was yet another bitter one for Heche who fought hard in court against paying alimony or child support to her estranged husband, who claimed that she was an unfit parent and had exhibited "bizarre and delusional behavior;" that Homer should stay with him in L.A. while Heche filmed on location in Canada. In the end, the cameraman was granted primary physical custody. Things only went downhill from there, with "Men in Trees" getting the ax following the 2007-08 writer's strike, leaving Heche to insist to the court that she could no longer pay Laffoon the monthly installments of $14,978 in child support.
Thus motivated, Heche quickly went back to work in projects like the straight-to-DVD eco-disaster movie Toxic Skies (2008), co-starring her new beau Tupper, and as an overly indulgent sugar mama in the little-seen Ashton Kutcher vanity project Toy boy (2009). After two years as a couple, she and Tupper welcomed a son, Atlas, into the world in early 2009. Professionally, things took an upturn for Heche when she was cast on the sexy comedy series Hung (2009) as Jessica, the spoiled, yet unfulfilled ex-wife of a high school athletic coach (Thomas Jane) who becomes a male escort to supplement his income. Along with the rest the stellar cast, Heche received some of the highest marks of her career for her work on the under-appreciated series. More accolades came her way for her turn as a fun-loving insurance saleswoman who finds an unexpected romance with an incredibly naïve colleague (Ed Helms) in the indie comedy Bienvenue à Cedar Rapids (2011). That same year, a supporting role as the ex-wife of a self-destructive LAPD officer (Woody Harrelson) in the gritty police drama Rampart (2011) further bolstered her Hollywood reputation. Working steadily, Heche also co-starred with Tupper as parents of a teenage girl whose vicious beating at the hands of fellow schoolgirls is caught on tape in the TV drama Le combat de ma fille (2011). The following year, the actress was seen in several limited-release efforts, including That's What She Said (2012) and Arthur Newman (2012).
