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BEVERLY HILLS (7/25/00) It's easy to see why people fall in love with Anne Heche. She's direct, she's funny, she's attractive. And she's resilient.
Three years after going public on "Oprah" about her romance with Ellen DeGeneres, Heche can smile about the craziness that followed.
Just back from a three-month, cross-country bus trip, filming a documentary about DeGeneres' comedy tour, Heche says brightly, "The worst thing people can say about me is, 'At least, she was honest.'"
Well, some people have called her worse names, but in her view, honesty is the important virtue.
"I'm a pretty outspoken person," the 31-year-old actress says. "I guess I could have been less so. But I look back and know that there wasn't anybody I could have called [for advice]. Who was the last movie star who came out and tried to get back into the movies?"
Heche, who wears a wedding ring and considers herself "a married woman," speaks without bitterness. Although her career stalled for awhile, it is gaining momentum again. She has completed two upcoming Hollywood features — "Auggie Rose," a love story with Jeff Goldblum, and "Prozac Nation," in which she plays Christina Ricci's psychiatrist. Next month, she begins work on "John Q," playing a doctor opposite Denzel Washington.
But the role Heche considers one of her best is that of Marine Capt. Mary Jane O'Malley, a divorced mother accused of murdering her lover in "One Kill," a Showtime film airing Aug. 6. Loosely based on a true story, "One Kill" co-stars Sam Shepard as O'Malley's lover, a fellow Marine and decorated war hero, and Eric Stoltz as the Marine lawyer assigned to defend her.
Facing Discrimination
Nibbling on a pizza in the garden restaurant of a Beverly Hills hotel, Heche says she was drawn to the part of O'Malley partly because of the hurdles she had to clear to become a ranking Marine officer.
"For a woman to become a captain is just so huge, and it means she's had to endure so much," Heche says. "Plus, this character is a single mother. ... I liked the combination, plus the affair and falling in love."
"It's an interesting, complex story, and I, of course, have an interest in dealing with issues of discrimination — as a person and as an actress."
Christopher Menaul, "One Kill's" British director, says he cast Heche in the role because he felt she's believable both as someone a man would risk his career for and as a woman giving orders. As for her image as one of America's most famous lesbians, he says it's a nonissue.
"The private lives of actors shouldn't matter," Menaul says, "It's whether you think they can play the role."
Since straight actors have won Academy Awards for playing gay, Heche jokes that she should have been a contender for playing a straight woman stranded on a South Seas island with Harrison Ford in "Six Days, Seven Nights."
"I love playing all kinds of parts," she says. "That's the job of an actress."
For "One Kill," Heche had more than her sexuality to sublimate. She's playing a character whose major behavioral trait is emotional restraint.
"For me to play a stoic Marine captain was a real challenge," she says. "Very rarely do Marines show their emotions, so for me to be reserved with my emotions was interesting. Nothing will silence me, although I'm sure there are plenty of people who wish that I'd be quiet."
Strict Upbringing
After much therapy, Heche has learned to channel those emotions into her work and the college seminars where she and DeGeneres discuss gender issues.
"It's interesting being in a position [where] because of what you've done and said, people want to listen," she says. "We talk about discrimination and love."
If playing the political activist is not a role Heche imagined for herself, neither was being an actress. The daughter of a strict Baptist who kept his homosexuality secret until just before his death from AIDS in 1983, Heche was not even exposed to pop culture.
"I heard girls talking about 'Charlie's Angels,'" she recalls, "but I wasn't allowed to watch TV."
Dinner Theater at Age 12
With family finances tight, Heche, whose public performing experience was limited to church choir, began looking for a job at age 12, and got one in a Trenton dinner theater, singing and dancing for $100 a week.
"It became such an escape from home, and I cherished it," Heche says. "It allowed me to play. I didn't play at home. There was no play in our family."
After her father died and her brother was killed in a car crash three months later, Heche moved with her mother and two sisters to Chicago. There, she continued acting in high school, where she was spotted by a talent scout.
The day after her high school graduation, she flew to New York to take a double role of identical twins in the daytime soap "Another World." When that four-year stint ended, Heche planned to enroll at Parsons School of Design, but fate intervened again in the form of an offer to co-star with Jessica Lange in the 1992 TV adaptation of Willa Cather's "O Pioneers!"
Heche moved to Los Angeles to pursue a film career, making her screen debut in "The Adventures of Huck Finn." A pivotal role as the doomed doctor friend of Demi Moore in "The Juror" brought her to critics' attention, and she followed that with co-starring roles opposite Johnny Depp in "Donnie Brasco" and Tommy Lee Jones in "Volcano." She played a presidential adviser in the political parody "Wag the Dog."
Though she conducted publicized romances with actors Richard Burgi and Steve Martin, it was not until she locked eyes with Ellen DeGeneres at the 1997 Vanity Fair Oscar party that lightning struck. At the time, she was negotiating for "Six Days, Seven Nights," the movie that figured to vault her into the front rank of Hollywood leading ladies.
"The past few years have been such a growth spurt for me," Heche says, putting a positive spin on the uproar that prompted her to change agents and move out of Hollywood for nearly a year.
"Fewer scripts came my way, so it forced me to do some of my longer-term goals sooner. Otherwise, I never could have written and directed two movies ["If These Walls Could Talk 2," "Leaving Normal"] in the last year. I've just directed a documentary. And now I'm starting to get more offers in the acting area."
"Things are coming back."