Entertainment
“It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable.”
Actress Anne Heche remained in a coma and was not expected to survive the injuries she sustained in a car crash last week, according to a statement that her publicist released Thursday night on behalf of her family and friends.
Heche, 53, was critically injured on Aug. 5 when the Mini Cooper she was in crashed into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, authorities said. She suffered a severe anoxic brain injury and was being treated at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital, the family statement said.
“It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,” the statement said.
The crash started a fire that took 59 firefighters more than an hour to extinguish, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Heche was the only person in the car, authorities said.
On Monday, a different representative, Michael A. McConnell, told Reuters that Heche had not regained consciousness since shortly after the accident.
In 1991, Heche won a Daytime Emmy award for outstanding younger actress in a drama series, for playing good and evil twins on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”
She starred in several popular Hollywood films in the late 1990s, including “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog” and “Six Days Seven Nights.” She continued to have television roles, including on “Men in Trees” in 2006 and “Hung” in 2009, and performed on Broadway, starring in “Proof” in 2002 and “Twentieth Century” in 2004, for which she received a Tony nomination.
She has several projects that are in postproduction, according to IMDb, including “Supercell,” a movie with Alec Baldwin, and the HBO show “The Idol.” She had recently finished filming on “Girl in Room 13,” a Lifetime movie that is scheduled to premiere in September, Variety reported.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.