World

Anne Heche Remains in Critical Condition After Car Crash

The actress Anne Heche remained in a coma, in critical condition and on a ventilator on Wednesday, five days after a car she was in crashed into a home in Los Angeles, a representative said.

There had been no change in her condition since Monday, when a different representative, Michael A. McConnell, told Reuters that Ms. Heche had not regained consciousness since shortly after the accident on Friday.

“She has a significant pulmonary injury requiring mechanical ventilation and burns that require surgical intervention,” Mr. McConnell said then.

Ms. Heche, 53, was critically injured on Friday when the Mini Cooper she was in crashed into a two-story home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, causing severe damage and a fire that took more than an hour to extinguish, the authorities said.

A Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman, Officer Norma Eisenman, confirmed earlier this week that Ms. Heche was involved in the crash. The authorities did not say that Ms. Heche was driving, but they did say that she was the car’s only occupant.

Ms. Heche was pulled from the car and taken to a hospital with “severe injuries,” the police said.

Anne Heche at the Directors Guild of America Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., in March.Credit…Jordan Strauss/Invision, via AP

It took 59 firefighters and more than an hour to extinguish the fire that started after the crash, the Fire Department said.

Officer Rosario Cervantes of the Los Angeles Police Department said on Wednesday that the cause of the crash was part of the investigation and that no charges had been filed. She said that after the crash, a warrant was obtained for a blood sample taken on the day of the crash.

“The investigation is ongoing pending the blood result,” Officer Cervantes said.

Ms. Heche began her career in daytime television, playing good and evil twins on the NBC soap opera “Another World,” for which she won a Daytime Emmy in 1991 for outstanding younger actress in a drama series.

In the late 1990s, she appeared in several popular Hollywood films, co-starring with Johnny Depp in “Donnie Brasco,” Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman in “Wag the Dog” and Harrison Ford in “Six Days Seven Nights.”

She had a three-year relationship with the comedian Ellen DeGeneres that ended in 2000.

Ms. Heche had roles in several TV shows, including “Men in Trees” in 2006 and “Hung” in 2009. More recent film credits include “The Best of Enemies” (2019), “The Vanished” (2020) and “13 Minutes” (2021). In 2020, she competed on ABC’s “Dancing With The Stars” and was eliminated after four weeks.

Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.

Back to top button