Her religious Christian family was unaware that Heche’s father, a choir director who was supposedly in the business of gas and oil, was leading what Heche, in her memoir, termed a “double life” as a gay man. Born in Aurora, Ohio, in 1969, she had a childhood pockmarked by homelessness and abuse. Heche had a reserve of bruising life experiences to draw upon. I wondered how Heche, performing on the show having barely reached adulthood, seemed to possess information about the human condition that far exceeded her years.Īnne Heche with her “Another World” co-star Russell Todd, circa 1990. Knowing about her struggles to find peace offscreen only heightened my response to her acting. As I discovered Heche’s talents on “Another World,” I felt as if someone had lied to me about her. More mockery ensued when she spoke of a divine alter ego named Celestia. Though she and DeGeneres separated in 2000, the opprobrium lingered, as did the memory of a psychotic break Heche suffered that same year, which resulted in her entering a stranger’s home in Fresno while high on Ecstasy. A romance with the comedian Ellen DeGeneres, beginning in 1997, had made her target practice for tabloids and an object of ridicule on “MADtv” segments. Yet the press had already largely written her off. By the time I was introduced to Heche’s acting, as a teen-ager in the mid-two-thousands, her “Another World” run was finding new life on the now defunct cable channel SOAPnet and on YouTube. But she would spend much of her career trying to shake off other kinds of reputational baggage. Then she sloughed off any stigmas associated with soap operas and made the leap to Hollywood. By the time she left the show, in 1991, with a Daytime Emmy, she was just twenty-two. Heche’s mercurial talents solidified during the course of her four-year run on “Another World.” The job, Heche told one journalist, required her to memorize sixty pages of dialogue a day. Each woman’s pain is vivid in its specificity, and so convincing that it’s easy to forgive the sequence’s hopelessly trite final moments: “Baby, he’s not going to hurt you again,” Vicky promises a wailing Marley as the soundtrack thrums ominously. Vicky coaxes the words from her sister and then vows to get revenge. Marley’s throat tightens as she tries to confess what happened. In a scene from late 1990, Marley tearfully tells Vicky that her partner, Jake, has raped her. The show, set in the fictional Bay City, gave Heche’s Vicky and Marley many screen partners in the form of lovers and family members, but Heche was rarely more electric than when playing against herself.
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With her cornflower-blue eyes and lanky carriage, she deftly navigated the implausibilities inherent to the soap genre (one story line involves Vicky impersonating Marley during the latter’s trial for attempted murder), and succeeded in infusing each sister with her own separate soul. But Heche did not exaggerate either of these defining traits, instead using subtle inflections to distinguish the two. Vicky was a headstrong tornado of a girl, Marley an avatar of virtue. Heche-who died on Sunday, at the age of fifty-three, after suffering a brain injury during a car crash, in Los Angeles-at first doubted her ability to make the two characters feel distinct.
“Vicky’s the bad one,” he said to her, Heche recalled in “ Call Me Crazy,” her 2001 autobiography.
Now, at a television studio in Brooklyn, the producer who’d hired her explained the nature of the assignment. A green talent plucked fresh from the Midwest, she’d previously acted in dinner-theatre and high-school drama productions. It was the day after her high-school graduation. When a seventeen-year-old Anne Heche first arrived on the set of the NBC daytime soap opera “Another World,” in 1987, she wasn’t aware that she’d be playing twins.
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