LOS ANGELES – Actress Anne Heche suffered severe burns after she crashed her car into a home and it was engulfed in flames in Los Angeles on Friday.
Heche, 53, crashed her Mini Cooper into a garage at the Mar Vista apartment complex. People nearby tried to get the actress out of the vehicle, but she backed up, drove off and drove into a home, which ignited a serious fire, TMZ reported.
First responders eventually pulled Heche in her charred clothes from the wreckage. When they placed her on a gurney she attempted to wiggle free, aerial footage showed.
.@Stu_Mundel was over this wild scene at the top of our noon newscast – a car that had crashed into an apartment complex in Mar Vista area
our crew captured the moment the suspected driver, now identified by @TMZ as actress Anne Heche, suddenly arose from the stretcher pic.twitter.com/WGQQjA4uXJ
— MarlaTellez (@MarlaTellez) August 5, 2022
The “Donnie Brasco” actress was hooked up to a ventilator and listed in critical condition at a hospital, but she is “expected to live,” according to TMZ.
Police noted that Heche was driving at a high rate of speed, which caused her Mini Cooper to encroach the home by about 30 feet. There was one occupant inside the residence during the crash, but in a different part of the home, and uninjured, the New York Post reported.
Residential security footage obtained by a local CBS station showed her automobile speeding through a suburban-style community prior to the collision.
EXCLUSIVE: Video shows the vehicle owned by actress Anne Heche speeding down a Mar Vista street moments before crashing into a home and sparking a fire. The story on @CBSLA 5pm. pic.twitter.com/1H93z5aVx7
— Rachel Kim (@CBSLARachel) August 5, 2022
The vehicle was completely demolished and barely recognizable afterward, according to news footage of the aftermath.
Here’s the now mangled vehicle owned by actress Anne Heche being towed away after speeding and crashing into a Mar Vista home and sparking a fire. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/rRSqnM1YDt
— Rachel Kim (@CBSLARachel) August 6, 2022
It was unclear if the actress was impaired at the time of the crash. She has spoken publicly about her troubles with substance abuse in the past.
“I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life,” she told ABC News in 2020.
The actress, who dated Ellen DeGeneres in the 90s before marrying cameraman Coleman Laffoon and dating actor James Tupper, said she turned to drugs and alcohol to deal with the trauma of being sexually abused by her father, Donald Heche, who secretly lived a gay lifestyle, the Post reported, before dying of AIDS in 1983.
According to her mini bio, Heche “came to recognition portraying Vicky Hudson and Marley Love in the soap opera Another World (1987-1991), which won her a Daytime Emmy Award and two Soap Opera Digest Awards. She came to mainstream prominence in the late 1990s with roles in the crime drama film Donnie Brasco (1997), the disaster film Volcano (1997), the slasher film I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), the action comedy film Six Days, Seven Nights (1998), and the drama-thriller film Return to Paradise (1998).”
