Anne Heche Facts: Celebrities Who Started on Soaps

Anne Heche is a film, television, and theater actress who is best known for her work in movies like Volcano, Six Days, Seven Nights, Return to Paradise, Wag the Dog, and the remake of Psycho. She also started her career on a soap.

Heche has appeared in a number of primetime television shows including Men in Trees and Hung. From her difficult childhood to opening up about her mental health struggles, here are five fast facts you need to know about the actress.

Who is Anne Heche?

She was born on May 25 in Aurora, Ohio. Her family (four siblings) moved 11 times while she was growing up, but they eventually settled in Ocean City, New Jersey. Her father passed away at age 45 from AIDS when Heche was 13 years old and three months later, her 18-year-old brother was killed in a car crash.

Her sister Cynthia died in infancy of a heart defect, and her sister Susan died of brain cancer at age 48. Only her sister Abigail is still alive.

Soap Beginnings
After landing an agent when she was 16 years old, Heche got an audition for As the World Turns. She was offered the job, but her mother insisted she finish high school first. After graduation, she won the dual role of twins Vicky and Marley on Another World.

Going For Gold
Thanks to her great work on Another World, Heche won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series during her last year on the show. She was also nominated for Broadway’s 2004 Tony Award as Best Actress for her role in a revival of Twentieth Century.

Mental Health Struggles

Heche has been very open about the fact that she has mental health issues, and has written that most of it stems from having been sexually abused by her father as a child, which she wrote in her 2001 book, Call Me Crazy: A Memoir. In it, she details the abuse and says that she continually works on her mental health every day.

Getting Personal With Anne Heche
Heche famously started dating Ellen DeGeneres in 1997, but the couple called it quits by August 2000. She then married Coleman Laffoon in 2001, whom she met while on DeGeneres’s comedy tour. The couple has a son, Homer, who was born in March 2002, but they divorced in February 2007.

She then started dating actor James Tupper and the couple had their first child, son Atlas, in March 2009. They officially broke up in 2018.