More On: Anne Heche
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The mother of the late actress Anne Heche is 85 years old and very religious. She has been through a lot and has made it through.
Nancy Heche has now outlived four of her five children and her husband, Donald, who was secretly gay and died of AIDS in 1983.
In her religion-heavy 2006 memoir, "The Truth Comes Out: When Someone You Love is in a Same-Sex Relationship," she said that she and Donald used amyl nitrate poppers to improve their sexual life and that they both slept with married people.
Anne died on Friday, a week after she sped down a LA street in her blue Mini Cooper and crashed into a small house, setting it and her car on fire.
Before Anne was born, her 2-month-old sister Cynthia died of a heart defect. Three months after Don Heche died, Anne's 18-year-old brother Nathan died in a car accident. Another sister, Susan Bergman, died of brain cancer in 2006. She wrote a book about her family called "Anonymity."
Abigail is the only child of Heche who is still alive.
The company in Chicago Nancy Heche was angry at first when Anne told her in 1997 that she was in love with Ellen DeGeneres. Heche is a Christian psychologist who uses the Bible in her counseling work.
“I am plummeted into disbelief and outrage,” she wrote. “I am dumbfounded, in a state of shock. Doesn’t Anne know what homosexuality has done to our family?”
“How will we ever be able to close the gap, the avowed heterosexual mother and the avowed homosexual daughter?” she added.
After "Call Me Crazy," Heche's autobiography came out in 2001, Nancy Heche wrote that she found "no place among the lies and blasphemies in these pages." Anne Heche said that her mother didn't believe her claims that her father abused her from the time she was a toddler until she was 12 years old.
Nancy was hurt when her daughter told her about her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres. She said she didn't know her husband was gay until 1983, when he was dying at Bellevue Hospital and a doctor told her he had AIDS.
She wrote that she didn't know about her husband's double life because she was a "50s girl" who "grew up with Donna Reed, 'Leave it to Beaver,' and Doris Day."
When Heche learned of her husband’s AIDS diagnosis, it suddenly “clicked,” she wrote.
“The dots connect like a stick of dynamite – the fuse sizzling toward explosion. I realize I have been lied to my entire married life.”
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