Anne Heche’s Off-Screen Infamy Never Outshined Her On-Screen Magnetism

Our cultural legacy is littered with stories like Anne Heche’s. She was raped by her Baptist choir director father, who later died of HIV/AIDS when she was 13. Three months later, her brother killed himself and one of her sisters died (Anne was one of five children) of a heart defect. Her revelations about her abuse in her memoir Call Me Crazy resulted in her estrangement from her mother and sister, Abigail, both of them refuting Anne’s memories of abuse. In 2006, her other surviving sister died of brain cancer. Her three-year relationship from 1997-2000 with Ellen Degeneres was tabloid fodder, and her subsequent marriage to a man became a source of derision in our culture, a culture that has never proven to be tolerant of any deviation from the mean. I remember the discourse at the time being how nuts Heche was, rather than how much she had overcome to get to where she was.

The day after her public separation from Degeneres, Heche was found wandering around Fresno, confused and rambling about needing to meet a spaceship that would take her away from this world. She said she thought it was a “culmination of a journey and a world that I thought I needed to escape to in order to find love.” Really, what we wanted to do to people like Heche, like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, too, was see them punished for the sins of being… what? For looking for acceptance and love?

I remember in 2001 when she went on 20/20 to talk to Barbara Walters (whose own cultural legacy looks more and more queasy in the rearview) about her struggles with her childhood, her addictions and her mental illness. She told Walters she created an alternate personality she named “Celestia,” and imagined she was a visitor from another planet. They are delusions familiar to the lonesome and the broken, I think — that there must be something else, somewhere else, a better childhood than the one you had and a safe place to hide when the weight of your trauma got too heavy to carry on your own. She says “I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life.” I think more often than not, we were the ones who should have been ashamed.

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On screen, Anne Heche was magnetic. She was the only thing you were interested in and she should’ve been a much bigger star than she was allowed to be. She was Jean Arthur: too smart, too vibrant for her time; she attracted a lot of the same roles Arthur used to, mainly as the woman looking to escape from the humdrum, to find a life exciting enough to deserve her. She is fully alive, present, and never too far from the characters she played. In Nicole Holofcenter’s exceptional Walking and Talking, Heche plays fledgeling therapist Laura, struggling in a relationship she’s starting to find stale, and working against her instinct to sabotage it.

At various points in the film — that exceedingly rare piece where two women are the emotional and narrative center of a drama — Laura has reason to apologize for her outspokenness in various situations. She tells her friend Amelia (Catherine Keener) that she should put her ailing cat to sleep. When Amelia is shocked, watch how Laura immediately offers to split the costs of treatment. The way Heche plays it, she’s not admitting she’s wrong, just instantly aware of how the moment requires her to demonstrate support and empathy rather than pragmatism. There aren’t a lot of actors who could walk this line without falling off into broad comedy or disingenuity. “I’m just a total fucking mess,” Laura says, and then she smooths her hair off her forehead and frowns at her friend in a way that communicates hope her friend will accept her anyway.

One of the last images from that film is Amelia holding Laura while she floats on her back in the middle of a lake to help her with her nerves on her wedding day. She asks her friend if she wants a turn being held and Amelia declines because Laura is the one who needs to be held — and it’s the job of friends to know this.

Two years earlier, in Donald Cammell’s little-seen erotic thriller Wild Side, Heche plays Alex, a high-powered banker by day who’s encouraged by her “pimp” boss to sleep with her clients; and a high-priced hooker by night who becomes the favorite of money-launderer Bruno (Christopher Walken) for her dominant personality intimidating intelligence. As their storylines tangle, Alex develops romantic feelings for Bruno’s wife Virginia (Joan Chen). Chen and Walken are intimidating, of course, but it’s Heche who is the most interesting thing about the film: a powerhouse, ever in control of her sexuality in every transaction, physical and verbal. Harpooned by a low budget and limited release strategy, overshadowed by the Wachowski’s bombastic Bound a year later, Heche is reason by herself to discover Wild Side — not the least for a resolution that reminds a lot of Jean Arthur’s A Lady Takes a Chance. I love how often things ended better for Heche’s characters than they ever could for her in real life.

She got so close, though. She was in so many productions in 1997 it felt like she was everywhere. She’s astonishing as long-suffering undercover FBI agent’s wife Maggie in Mike Newell’s elegiac Donnie Brasco — telling him that a check is not a husband before stopping a fight with the confession that the house is empty over Christmas because she sent the kids away so they can be alone. She’s tough and has it all figured out. And she’s broken apart with fear and doubt at her ability to continue to manage the uncertainty of her day-to-day without him. She’s in the movie for fifteen minutes (of the film’s 140 minute running time), showing up late at a couples therapy session she plays the absolute shit out of. An exposed nerve but never histrionic, she holds a hand to her temple like she’s keeping, just barely, a terrible animal from escaping. At the end, when her husband goes too deep, she answers the door expecting the worst news and what is there to say but Heche (in four scenes, maybe five?) makes herself the moral and emotional center of a late American masterpiece. She’s told her husband will listen to her and she says “you think so?” and carries in those three words a megaton payload of complex human emotions in conflict with one another.

It was two months after the release of Donnie Brasco that news broke of her affair with Ellen Degeneres who had, that month, appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the first “out” star of a major U.S. situation comedy. Heche insisted on taking Ellen as her date to the Volcano premiere and was told her contract with Fox would be void if she did. She did it anyway because she’s Anne Heche and Fox publicity rushed her away before the movie was over so she couldn’t be photographed at the afterparty with the woman she loved. In a 2020 interview with Page Six, Heche said “It changed my life forever. The stigma attached to that relationship was so bad… I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years. I was fired from a $10 million picture deal.” Three-and-a-half years later, Heche left Degeneres for another man, the public casting her now as an adulterer in place of sexual deviant and liberal wackadoo. For her part, Degeneres didn’t do very much to protect Heche. It’s not her job to do so, but when the “nicest” person in Hollywood is not a fan, that carries a stigma with it, too.

Heche is fantastic in the very bad Volcano as volcanologist Dr. Barnes, thrown into an actor’s lion’s pit with Tommy Lee Jones, Don Cheadle and John Carroll Lynch. She kills it. She’s dazzlingly smart and she’s never able to hide it so, obviously, she’s blinding when cast as someone who is not just smart, but in a profession where she’s had to learn to be particularly sharp in order to be heard. By herself, she makes questionable pictures not just palatable, but at least in her scenes, actually great.

In a good movie, like that same year’s Wag the Dog, she holds up even against guys like Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. Her eyes are impossibly bright in every scene she plays against either of them — like she’s more alive when pushed against these legends, these men not afraid of anything here in the late ’90s (before either of them were in the business of debasing themselves in cash grabs). If Tommy Lee Jones was a lion in 1997, De Niro and Hoffman were 800 lb gorillas, and there’s tiny Anne Heche, going blow-for-blow and coming out on top in her pin-stripes and heels like Rosalind Russell finding her timing against Cary Grant, of all people. She’s essentially a foil in Wag the Dog, a character who is the rationale for the narrative’s exposition, and a lesser actor would just be a concrete wall the plot’s ball bounces off of. With Heche, this foil seems like an active participant in all the intricate shenanigans unfolding throughout the course of the piece.

She’s an absolute force of nature, but she was no match for the prejudices of our culture who saw in all of her strengths, weaknesses. She was a fierce survivor who refused to be grateful for the things she had earned; she was a mesmerizing performer who was the perfect choice to play Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane in Gus Van Sant’s Psycho reboot. She was the antidote to Julia Roberts’ emetic likeability and Sandra Bullocks’ everywoman approachability — she didn’t give a particular shit if you liked her or not, so when the culture got the chance to take her down, it took her down hard.

Six Days, Seven Nights (1998) should have been her elevation into the high concept rom-com pantheon: the Meg Ryan stratosphere, Roberts and Bullock, too, of course. She’s cast opposite Harrison Ford as a tightly-wound businesswoman away on an island holiday with her nebbish boyfriend (David Schwimmer) when she founds herself marooned with a hunky puddle-jumper pilot for just long enough to change her romantic fortunes. It’s a breezy enough picture that showcases Heche’s command of the screen, and it was instantly hobbled by reviews like Lisa Schwartzbaum’s for Entertainment Weekly, a review that starts with “So, to answer your question: Anne Heche’s noisy love affair with Ellen DeGeneres in no way interferes with her convincing portrayal of a hetero cutie.” Three years later, Meg Ryan’s affair with Russell Crowe during their Proof of Life took over that film’s conversation as well, with the queen of American nice figuring out that no woman in the United States had enough good will not to be destroyed by proof of their humanity. If Ryan didn’t have a chance, of course Heche didn’t have a chance.

She went to supporting roles then, and television, too; at the height of her powers; she found her fame had curdled to notoriety. And every single time she showed up, she blew it up. She never lost her spark — she was never less than the center of every scene. Your eye was magnetized to whatever metal alloy she was composed of, and what an incredible tragedy we didn’t get another two decades of featured roles for her. My favorite performance of hers is a small but typically-pivotal one in Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece Birth. She’s introduced in the film on the arm of Peter Stormare, on their way to an engagement party around Christmas, when she steps out the elevator saying she’s forgotten the ribbon for their present and is going back to retrieve it. When the door closes, she cocks her head, eyes preternaturally bright, in an inquisitive gesture — a defiant one communicating to her beau how she’s doing this and is not concerned at all about his discomfort arriving at the party by himself. Then, once out of his sight, she collapses on a bench. She’s amazing and this amazing film is, while not about her, is literally about the thing she does next in the park, the way she walks as though engaged in a tango by herself, the way she tries to brush the dirt off her hands but, like Lady MacBeth, can’t hide the evidence of her sin. Every moment in Birth is art, of course, but it’s Heche who gets the most important notes in the piece. She confesses in the end to a moment of weakness and reminds me in that moment of Tippi Hedren switching the card on the lovebirds at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. She serves the same function as Hedren’s Melanie Daniels.

In Birth, she is the reason all hell opens up, and it’s because she decides at a critical moment to betray her own power, to hide her knowledge, to choose to protect the status quo when her brand is chaos. Anne Heche died in the most terrible way I can imagine someone dying: in unimaginable psychic pain, burning for thirty minutes before she could be freed. The instant response of many on the Internet is to pile on her again for her weaknesses that led her to this place. Yes she could have killed someone in the process of killing herself, but she didn’t. And I hope when my demons eventually get the best of me, that there will be more empathy spared me than my demons. Anne Heche was great. We didn’t get to see enough, but we saw enough to know what we lost.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.