As Anne Heche opened up about her difficult childhood, which she said included sexual abuse by her father, suggesting in multiple interviews that she had no plans to reconcile with her fervently religious mother, whom she said ignored the abuse even as she spoke out against homosexuality and blasted her for her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres.
If that reconciliation never took place, then Anne Heche and her 85-year-old mother, Nancy Heche, have lost that chance. The 53-year-old actor died over the weekend, one week after she drove her blue Mini Cooper at a high speed down a residential Los Angeles street and crashed into a small house, setting it and the car on fire.
With Heche’s death, Nancy Heche has outlived four of her five children, all of whom died under tragic circumstances, according to the New York Post. Nancy Heche also long outlived her husband, Donald Heche, a Baptist minister and choir director who had secret affairs with men and died of AIDS in 1983.
Before Heche was born, her sister, Cynthia died from a heart defect at the age of 2 months. Anne’s 18-year-old brother, Nathan, died in a car accident three months after Donald Heche’s death. A second sister, Susan Bergman, died in 2006 from brain cancer.
With regard to her mother, Anne Heche said they stopped speaking after she began a high-profile relationship with DeGeneres in 1997, as she told The Guardian. That’s the same year that DeGeneres made TV history and broke social barriers when she and the character on her hit sitcom, “Ellen,” came out as gay.
“I was drawn to her, she was drawn to me,” Heche told The Guardian in 2000. “I was inside out, I was upside down, everything was complete. Nobody else mattered.” But as Heche told the Tampa Bay Times and The Guardian, her sexual orientation mattered to her mother, a Chicago-based Christian psychologist who uses the Bible in her counseling practice, the New York Post said.
Heche told the Tampa Bay Times that her mother believed that her lesbian relationship was a “sin.” Nancy Heche acknowledged that she was furious when her daughter told her that she’d fallen in love with a woman, according to The New York Post.
Nancy Heche – a mother’s heart hardened by zealotry https://t.co/W62kwj1mg5 pic.twitter.com/9mYVbcgFwN
— MarjorieOrr (@MarjorieOrr) August 14, 2022
“I am plummeted into disbelief and outrage,” Nancy Heche wrote in her religiously-themed 2006 memoir, according to the Post. “I am dumbfounded, in a state of shock. Doesn’t Anne know what homosexuality has done to our family?”
“How will we ever be able to close the gap, the avowed heterosexual mother and the avowed homosexual daughter?” Nancy Heche added.
Following her relationship with DeGeneres, she was married to cameraman Coleman “Coley” Laffoon from 2001 until they split in 2007, and with whom she had a son, Homer, 20. She also began a 10-year relationship with Canadian actor James Tupper in 2007, with whom she had son Atlas, 13. She also had relationships with Liz Brixius, the co-creator of “Nurse Jackie,” and actor Thomas Jane.
The rift between mother and daughter widened after Heche broke up with DeGeneres, suffered a well-publicized mental health breakdown, and wrote about her difficult childhood and her father’s sexual abuse in her 2001 memoir, “Call Me Crazy.”
Heche revealed in the book that her father was a closeted gay man who left his wife and four children at home at night to cruise bars in their hometown of Aurora, Ohio, according to the Daily Mail. She also said her father, who probably had schizophrenia, sexually molested from when she was a toddler until she was 12 years old.
“He raped me … he fondled me, he put me on all fours and had sex with me,” Heche added in a 2001 interview with Barbara Walters.
Heche told Walters her father gave her genital herpes and she later feared he infected her with HIV. When she was a child, Heche believed her mother could or should have seen signs of sexual abuse when she was changing her diapers.
Heche also said that her mother, “a good Christian woman,” would never confront her husband. “She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t scream. She didn’t yell.”
After Heche began acting professionally and her career began to flourish in the late 1980s, first on the soap opera “Another World” and then in major Hollywood films, she was still haunted by her past, according to the Walters interview.
Following years of therapy, Heche confronted her mother about her father’s sexual abuse, she said.
“She hung up the phone on me,” Heche told Walters. “To have gone through so much work to heal myself and have my mother not acknowledge in any way that she was sorry for what had happened to me broke my heart. And in that moment, I split off from myself.”
Heche was referring to the fragmenting of her personality, leading to times when she became psychotic and began hearing voices, as she explained in the interview and in her memoir.
Nancy Heche did not react well to her daughter’s memoir, writing herself that she found “no place among the lies and blasphemies in the pages of this book,” the New York Post reported. Nancy Heche also said: “I am trying to find a place for myself in this writing, a place where I as Anne’s mother do not feel violated or scandalized.”
In 2004, Anne Heche was given a chance to work through some of her childhood trauma from her mother’s perspective by playing the abusive, alcoholic mother of a 16-year-old girl in the Lifetime TV drama, “Gracie Choice,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
“Gracie’s mom was fun and great-looking and none of the things we associate with people who are verbally and emotionally abusive,” Heche said. “I was thrilled that Lifetime wanted to show the truthfulness of that reality.”
Heche then got personal in the Los Angeles Times interview, saying, “I always wondered if my mother was conscious — if you can treat children that way and still love them. What I learned in doing the movie is that you cannot behave the way the woman in this movie did, or my mother did, and still love. It was a relief to me to finally come to terms with this question.”
By 2009, Nancy Heche seemed to have softened her tone about her daughter’s relationship with DeGeneres, acknowledging in an interview that she didn’t handle her daughter’s coming out well, according to AL.com
“I’m sorry I didn’t know how to deal with it well,” Nancy Heche said. “God was giving me an opportunity.” Nancy Heche also said, “We connect and we don’t connect. That’s pretty typical. I have a growing relationship, a loving relationship with her. I love her.”
Nancy Heche said she was an “advocate” for “showing love and respect to the gay community,” but she continued to speak at “homophobic conferences” around the country, the Daily Mail noted.
In 2011, Anne Heche told The Telegraph that she was still estranged from her mother, who, at the time, was offering Christian counseling that purportedly “cures” homosexuals. Heche also said her mother had never met her two sons.
“Forgiveness is a funny word for me,” Heche told The Telegraph. “I’m OK with my mother living her life the way she wants to live it, and I’m OK with her not participating in my life the way I want to live it.”
In 2015, Nancy Heche conceded that her daughter had stopped talking to her, the Daily Mail reported. “She made the decision to cut off communication,” Nancy Heche said.