Anne Heche

Published August 17th, 2000 - 03:00 GMT

Date of Birth: May 25, 1969.

Place of Birth: Aurora, Ohio, USA.

Sign: Sun in Gemini, Moon in Virgo.

Relations: Companion: Ellen DeGeneres.

Education: High school.

WITH A POWERFUL screen presence and charisma, a free spirit and great range as an actress, Anne Heche has become a big star in Hollywood.

Heche has taken on Hollywood’s most coveted roles, such as Psycho, opposite Vince Vaghn, Six Days Seven Nights with Harrison Ford, and Wag The Dog opposite Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro. What actor or actress would want more?

Early on in her career, Heche broke the lesbian taboo, along with her partner Ellen DeGeneres by being the first Hollywood couple to come out of the closet on their lesbianism.

However, Heche’s life wasn’t always this good. Heche's childhood was marked by horrific suffering that shaped her survivalist's outlook on life. Her father, Donald Heche, was a choir director in a Baptist church who frequented gay bars at night. Heche found out about her father's double life at the age of 12, as he lay dying of AIDS. "I watched my dad disintegrate from AIDS because he was ashamed to be what he wanted to be," Heche said. He died the following year. Before the shock of her father's death could sink in, Heche's brother was killed in a car crash. The lifestyle of Anne’s father had always prompted the little girl to work between school hours to get some extra money to support her family. The double tragedy of her father and brother's deaths put even more pressure on her to help take care of her mother and two sisters. In high school, performing became less of an economic necessity and more of an after-school avocation for Heche, but her professionalism was nonetheless apparent.

It was in high school that Heche got her first break. While appearing in a production of The Skin of Our Teeth, a 15-year-old Heche was approached by a talent scout from the daytime drama As The World Turns. She turned down a proffered job on the soap because it would have forced the family to relocate from Chicago to New York, but accepted another opportunity on Another World after she graduated from high school. "The day I arrived, the producer said, “Oh, by the way, you're playing twins, and one of them is a real sexpot. In your first scene you'll be naked in a bathtub and you've just lost a million dollars,” Heche says. She played twins Marley McKinnon and Vicki Hudson Frame — one good, one evil — for four years, winning a day time Emmy along the way.

Heche toyed with the idea of design school, but the overwhelming temptation of acting in television movies brought her instead to Hollywood. She made the inarguably bad O Pioneers! and Girls in Prison, and began to break into feature films in small supporting roles. One of these films, A Simple Twist of Fate, led to a two-year romantic relationship with co-star Steve Martin, who would later call the relationship a "torturous love affair." It apparently ended quite badly for Martin, whose friends took to calling Heche the "Heartbreak Kid" in the wake of the break-up. But Heche had a blossoming career to attend to.

From then on, Heche’s career started to pull off day after day; making her one of Hollywood’s most coveted actresses.

Movies:

1998 Six Days Seven Nights

1998 Return to Paradise

1997 Wag the Dog

1997 I Know What You Did Last Summer

1997 Subway Stories: Tales from the Underground

1997 Volcano

1997 Donnie Brasco

1996 Walking and Talking

1996 The Juror

1996 If These Walls Could Talk