Anne Heche crashed her car into a residence in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles on Friday, and remained hospitalized and in critical condition on Saturday morning, according to CNN. A source told the news outlet that the actress is “lucky to be alive” and “has severe burns and has a long recovery ahead.”
A Los Angeles Police Public Information Officer said that Heche’s vehicle was “traveling at a high rate of speed when it ran off the road and collided with a residence” on Friday. The resulting fire took over one hour to extinguish.
No other injuries were reported.
Video from a neighborhood security camera shows what Fox 11 Los Angeles reported as Heche’s blue MINI Cooper as “fly[ing] by” at “a high rate of speed.”
The automobile crashed through the middle of the house, which was badly burned. Rescue workers pulled Heche from the car and brought her to an ambulance on a stretcher covered in a white sheet. A helicopter videographer caught the moment she sprung up reflexively, tearing the sheet off, surprising the emergency workers. This footage is unpleasant to look at, so we’ve decided not to embed it.
The Ohio-born Heche, 53, got her start on the daytime soap Another World and is best known for a string of films in the mid-to-late 1990s, including Six Days Seven Nights, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Donnie Brasco, Wag the Dog, and Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. This roughly coincided with her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres, one of the more visible LGBT couples of the time.
In August 2000, Heche suffered a psychological breakdown, culminating in her wandering Fresno, California, telling people she was going to travel in a spaceship. She knocked on the door of one woman’s home “in the middle of nowhere” and stayed for over a half hour, “gulp[ing] down glass upon glass of water,” then asking to take a shower and watch a movie on the couch. The resident recognized the actress but contacted the sheriff’s department.
In recent years, Heche has appeared in some mid-budget VOD movies and was a contestant, in 2020, on Dancing With The Stars.