She never stopped working, but the Anne Heche offscreen soon started to overshadow the Anne Heche on. Still, there were artists, like Jonathan Glazer, who recognized what she could bring to a project. He tapped her for a pivotal role in his surreal 2004 film, “Birth” (HBO Max), in which Nicole Kidman plays an Upper East Side bride-to-be visited by a young boy who claims to be her dead husband reincarnated. During one of the opening scenes, Heche is disconcertingly on edge, balking before entering a party and instead going to bury her gift in the woods, then rushing to a store to replace what she hid, eyes flooded with guilt. Her character hovers around the action like a threat, until she snaps into focus, the true purpose of her existence floating into her intense gaze.
“Birth” is an otherworldly piece, and it’s almost as if Glazer uses Heche to further unsettle the audience, a task she takes on with vigor. More than 10 years later, Onur Tukel tapped into Heche’s rage in “Catfight” (Netflix), a comedy that cast her as an artist who gets into a vicious punching match with a college friend (Sandra Oh) over resentment and class conflict.
There was a chance that Heche was on the verge of yet another career revival. She had finished a role in the forthcoming HBO series “The Idol,” created by the musician the Weeknd, Sam Levinson of “Euphoria” and Reza Fahim. For all the questions about what opportunities she may not have gotten — because of homophobia or ridicule or mental health stigmas — in an interview with Los Angeles magazine around the time of the release of “Birth” she explained, “It’s funny, it’s not necessarily the career I had before, but it’s the life I want.”
It would be easy to let the circumstances of her crash cloud the memory of her artistry, but it’s just as easy to picture her as Laura in “Walking and Talking,” hair full of flowers and heart full of nerves, heading to her wedding with her best friend.
Leave a Reply