Actress Anne Heche revealed she is three months' pregnant in a chat with interview doyenne Barbara Walters which aired on US TV on Wednesday night. The Six Days, Seven Nights beauty spoke candidly about her recent marriage to cameraman Coleman Laffoon, her romance with comedienne Ellen DeGeneres and the sexual abuse she says she suffered at the hands of her late father.
“I’m not crazy,” said the 32-year-old actress. “But it’s a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me.”
Anne has claimed to have been abused by her father Donald Heche, a church choir director who died of AIDS in the early Eighties. “I think it’s always hard for children to talk about abuse because it’s only a memory,” she said. “I didn’t carry around a tape recorder… I didn’t chisel anything in stone… Anybody can look and say, ‘Well, how do you know for sure?’.”
To escape the pain she felt, Anne says she retreated into what she called a “fourth dimension”. “I had a fantasy world that I escaped to… I called my other personality Celestia. I believed I was from that world. I believed I was from another planet. I think I was insane.”
At the 1997 Oscars ceremony Anne met Ellen. “I saw the most ravishing woman I had ever seen in my life standing across the room,” remembers Anne. “Her name was Ellen DeGeneres. She was radiating. I think at certain times in people’s lives you must radiate an energy and a glow of fabulousness. And that was her. I had never seen anybody lit up so much.”
The two spent three years together before splitting in August 2000.
Anne soon began dating Coley, a cameraman shooting a documentary about Ellen. “He’s an extraordinary guy,” she says of her new husband. “He’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who actually embraces the same notion about sexuality that I do… which is that you love who you love. You fall in love with a person, not a sex.”
“I think everything I’ve done in all my insanity was to try to get my parents to love me,” she says. “My father loved movie stars. I decided I needed to become famous to get his love. My mother loved Jesus. That was her thing. So I wanted to become Jesus Christ.”
But as her tell-all book Call Me Crazy hits stores, Anne also told chat-show host Barbara that she has finally found happiness. “I’m here,” she says. “I could not be more elated with my life.”
The book, which she says is to say goodbye “to my story of shame and embrace my life choice of love”, proved to be a cathartic experience. “The fact that there are people hearing my story is the icing on the most beautiful cake in the world, that I imagine says, ‘Happy freedom, Anne. You have made it to the other side’.”
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
