She is an actress “solar“, a “happy soul” who died this Friday, August 12 according to her agent: Anne Heche ended up succumbing to her injuries after a very violent car accident which had set her vehicle on fire, and six days of coma. An actress appreciated by her colleagues, but who hid behind his smile a very dark past…
And in particular a very difficult year 1983, during which the actress first lost her brother, who also died of a car accident, which the star had always thought was a suicide. But it was her father, who also died that year at the age of 45, who marked her for life: the man had indeed succumbed to AIDS. A disease which then, at the same time, taught his family in a brutal way that he had homosexual relations. He had never assumed before to be gay.
A very difficult relationship to sexuality that her daughter had revealed as an adult, explaining that her father had raped her a few years earlier, during her childhood. “He raped me… He touched me, he put me on all fours to have sex with me“, she had written in her memoirs entitled call me crazy. “I think my dad had a sex addiction. I think he saw everyone as sexual beings“.
The weight of religion in a conservative family
Strong words, which confirm what she said in another interview: “We never told the truth once in my family. We were poor, but we said we were rich. We were falling apart, but we said we were good Christians. We had a father who lived a double life, but we acted like everything was fine“.
A relationship to religion that undoubtedly weighed in the childhood of the actress, since her father, who never assumed his true sexual orientation was pastor and that his widowed mother Nancy is part of ultra-conservative anti-LGBT associationswhere she asserts that prayer can “cure homosexuality“. An unfounded theory, of course, which had caused the rupture between her and her daughter.
Indeed, Anne Heche, before having several relationships with men, was in a relationship for three years with a very famous woman, Ellen DeGeneres. An affair that Nancy, who never acknowledged the abuse her daughter suffered as a child, is said to have described as “the betrayal of an unspoken wish: we will never have anything to do with homosexuals“. A few years later, she would then publicly claim that her prayers had caused their breakup, infuriating her daughter, who ended up cutting ties definitively in 2015.