Anne Heche on Ellen, Celestia, her closeted gay dad and why her mom will never meet her kids

I was just fascinated by the New York Times Magazine profile on Anne Heche. She has always been a terrific actress – I loved her in Wag the Dog and on TV’s Men in Trees – but her personal life has, at times, seemed a bit wacky.

She makes a lot more sense to me now and I admire her for coming out the other end as a functioning human being and currently co-starring in HBO’s Hung with Thomas Jane and in the new feature film Spread with Ashton Kutcher.

The Sunday piece by Alex Mitchell covers her life  as the sexually abused child of an evangelical Christian father who was also a closeted gay man who died of AIDS in 1983. After his death, her mother became a Christian therapist, lecturing on behalf of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family about “overcoming” homosexuality.

An excerpt: Anne’s account in her own memoir of her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s denial of it is devastating. She writes that Nancy Heche told her that as an infant she couldn’t diaper Anne properly because of sores and rashes she had on her vagina but never knew why. Anne got herpes from her father, and in 1983, after he died of AIDS, doctors told her she would have to wait years to learn that she was not infected. She was 14 then; she wrote that the abuse stopped when she was 12. Heche said that when she called her mother — during her seventh year in therapy — to confront her about the abuse, her mother ended the conversation by saying, “Jesus loves you, Anne,” before hanging up. In her memoir, Nancy Heche, who is now 72, never addresses the issue of Anne’s abuse.

Nor has she read her mother’s book. “My mother’s had a very tragic life,” she said. “Three of her five children are dead, and her husband is dead. That she is attempting to change gay people into straight people is, in my opinion, a way to keep the pain of the truth out. People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love. My mother preaches to this day the opposite of that core of my life. It is no mistake that she still stands up against love. And one wonders why I’m not rushing to have her meet my children.”

This is all just heartbreaking. And, as the magazine article points out, gives insight into Anne’s relationship with Ellen DeGeneres past all the publicity that surrounded it.

“My love was so all-consuming for a human being who would tell the truth,” Anne says in the piece. “The impact that has on a child who grew up with such shame about who she was, who her father was, the disease he died of, the hatred my mother had for anything gay. And I got to participate in a loving truthful celebration of the way I thought the world should be.” She turned up her palms. “How could that destroy my career? I still can’t wrap my head around it.”

More from the NY Times piece: Because Heche’s emotional breakdown happened the day after her breakup with DeGeneres — she turned up near Fresno, dressed in a bra and shorts at someone’s front door asking to take a shower before leaving Earth on her spaceship — people seemed to think it was a reaction to DeGeneres. But Heche wrote in her memoir that Celestia began six years earlier, after her mother’s refusal to acknowledge her abuse. “In that moment I split off from myself,” she wrote. While working on movies she would go to her trailer to transcribe messages she believed she was receiving from God, as Celestia.

To have crashed so publicly and rebounded so mightily is no less than extraordinary. “I went to a lot of therapy,” she said. “I talked my head off and pounded enough pillows and confronted enough ghosts. I didn’t avoid the feelings of what my childhood was. I went right into them and went as deeply as I could.” She does seem remarkably free of anger or bitterness, at this point, at least. “I think people saw how hard it was for me,” she said. “It’s what makes me the artist that I am, it’s my bag of sorrow, of human tragedy that I’ve lived through, and I go to this well every single time I create a character. But that no longer dictates my daily life.”