Longtime daytime drama fans always remember their first soap and always remember the star who had them mesmerized to the point where they could never look away. For this writer and lifelong fan, that soap is Another World, and that star is Anne Heche.
Anne Heche Left Her Soap Mark
The soap world was devastated upon learning that one of our own, a Daytime Emmy winner who made it in Hollywood and the movies after beginning her career on a little soap that taped in a small Brooklyn, NY studio, had been involved in a fiery car crash that left her severely burned and on life support.
While the rest of social media remembered Heche, the woman who was once Ellen DeGeneres’s partner and who had been on the cover of tabloids due to mental health issues, soap fans remembered the teenager who made her television debut right out of high school in 1987.
In fact, the soap world remembered Heche so well that on the day the news broke that her death was imminent, Another World began trending on Twitter as fans posted memories and video clips of Heche’s astounding work as ‘good and bad twins’ Victoria and Marley Hudson.
Of course, neither was 100% good nor 100% bad, but Heche definitely made sure each one was their own person, so you never had any doubt about who she was bringing to life onscreen at any given moment. Anne Heche made that social media moment in time happen when a long-ago soap that left the airwaves in 1999 became a show everyone was talking about again.
Anne Heche Made The Seemingly-Impossible Happen
In 1987, when Heche took on the role of Victoria Hudson months before her sister Marley Hudson returned to AW and the fictional town of Bay City, another actress had already collected a Daytime Emmy for creating the roles. Nobody ever thought anyone else could be accepted as Donna Love’s twin daughters after Ellen Wheeler’s star turn, but Heche came in like gangbusters and proved everyone wrong.
Her first scene, which took place in a bubble bath with her hair up in a messy bun calling her parents for money, became part of the show’s opening for her entire run on the show. That’s how unforgettable it was and why it will always be etched in our minds.
Four Years Soap Fans Will Never Forget
Heche only played Vicky and Marley for four years, but those years launched her star in Hollywood as she earned a Daytime Emmy in 1991 for Outstanding Ingenue (a category that has now morphed into Outstanding Younger Performer), soon before she exited Another World for the primetime and Tinseltown world.
In the ensuing years, she would become a subject of entertainment gossip through mental health struggles and a very public breakdown. By 2001, Heche published a harrowing memoir, revealing details of an early childhood filled with sexual abuse.
After a string of successful films, including Volcano and Six Days, Seven Nights, Heche deliberately faded into the background a bit as she focused on her personal life and becoming a mother.
During the last week of her life, when several videos were released of her state of mind when she recklessly drove that car into a Los Angeles home, leading to her eventual death, many on social media condemned her, but soap fans didn’t. They remembered her as the teenage girl who astounded them every day for four years in the afternoon, making you feel every emotion Vicky and Marley felt.
If there is ever a medium to capture such talent during a small snapshot of a career, it’s soap operas, and the genre, along with its fandom, was and always will be lucky to call Anne Heche our own.
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