Ellen Degeneres Ex Girlfriend Anne Heche Taken Off Life Support After 100 MPH car crash in residential neighborhood

Anne Heche, an actress who was as well known for her roles in films like “Six Days, Seven Nights” and “Donnie Brasco” and also being known as the ex partner of comedian Ellen DeGeneres, died on Sunday in Los Angeles, nine days after she was in a devastating car accident there. She was 53.

Her death was announced by a representative, Holly Baird, who said late Sunday in an email that Ms. Heche had been “peacefully taken off life support.”

Ms. Heche was critically injured on Aug. 5 when a Mini Cooper she was driving crashed into a two-story home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, causing a fire that took firefighters more than an hour to extinguish. Ms. Heche, who was alone in the car, sustained burns and a severe anoxic brain injury, caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.

In newly obtained doorbell camera video, Anne Heche can be seen speeding down a residential road in Los Angeles, moments before crashing into a home that would go up in flames.

Before hitting the home, witnesses told TMZ that Heche, 53, had hit a garage door with her car, and that they tried to help her out before she reversed the car and fled the scene.

ANNE AND ELLEN

Ms. Heche began a relationship with Ms. DeGeneres in 1997, at a time when same-sex relationships in Hollywood were not fully accepted. The relationship became widely known in April of that year when they appeared, hand in hand, at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. A few days later, Ms. DeGeneres’s character on her sitcom, “Ellen,” came out as gay.

Ms. Heche’s decision to reveal that she was in a lesbian relationship, The New York Times wrote, “confronted Hollywood with a highly delicate problem: how to deal with a gay actress whose career has been built on playing heterosexual roles.”

After that relationship ended, Ms. Heche married and later divorced a man, Coleman Laffoon, with whom she had a son, Homer. She also had a son, Atlas Heche Tupper, from her relationship with the actor James Tupper.

Complete information on her survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Heche told The New York Post in 2021 that she had been “blacklisted” in Hollywood because of her relationship with Ms. DeGeneres.

The former Ellen DeGeneres Show host and Heche had an instant connection when they met in 1997, at a Vanity Fair party.

“I met her at the Vanity Fair party. And it was a chemistry thing that you can’t really describe,” DeGeneres later recalled while speaking with the Tampa Bay Times in May 1998. “It just happened. Obviously, I was attracted to her, but that wasn’t enough. There are a lot of attractive people. She is so unique.”

The pair initially crossed paths shortly before DeGeneres’ Timemagazine cover story, which ready, “Yep, I’m Gay,” hit newsstands and just days before Heche’s film Volcano was set to hit theaters.

Despite any potential backlash at the time, Heche opted to have DeGeneres by her side when she walked the 1997 Volcano red carpet. The choice ultimately changed her career — and shifted how same-sex couples were viewed.

“I took Ellen, we were told that my contract for Fox would be [ended] and I would be fired. And that the movie that I had just met Harrison Ford on wouldn’t hire me,” Heche recalled during a 2018 interview on the “Irish Goodbye” podcast. “And we went to the premiere — these are the stories that I know people don’t know — we went to the premiere, we were tapped on the shoulder, put into her limo in the third act and told that we couldn’t have pictures of us taken at the press junket. And both she and I were fired that week.”