Anne Heche

Anne Celeste Heche was born on May 25, 1969, in Aurora, Ohio, the youngest of five children of Donald "Don" Joe Heche and Nancy Heche (née Prickett). During her early childhood, the Heche family lived in various towns around Ohio, including suburbs of Cleveland and Akron. Heche's parents were fundamentalist Christians and the family was raised in a deeply religious environment, a situation that she later likened to being "raised in a cult". At the same time, her father led an unstable lifestyle, often changing professions and prone to frequent get-rich-quick schemes, though also with a real gift for music that led to jobs as a choir director in several churches. Heche noted in her memoir that her family changed denominations several times depending on which church her father found work in.

Because of Don Heche's often unstable lifestyle and financial situation, the family moved numerous times during her childhood. One of his financial schemes led the family to resettle in the Atlantic City, New Jersey, area in 1977, first in Ventnor City and later Ocean City. One of Anne's first jobs was at a boardwalk hamburger stand, where she would sing songs from Annie to attract customers.

The Heche family's precarious financial situation led to the foreclosure of a home her father owned and later their eviction from a rental home. They moved in with a family from their church who offered them a place to live as an act of charity. Anne's mother separated from her father and demanded he leave the household. Her mother and all of the children then took jobs to support the family and be able to live on their own. Anne found work at a dinner theater in Swainton, her first professional acting job, earning $100 a week (about $300 per week in 2022 dollars).

Don Heche moved to New York City, where Anne and her sisters would occasionally visit him, noticing his declining health. He claimed it was cancer, when in fact he had developed late-stage AIDS. Although he lived as a gay man in New York, Don kept his sexuality and the nature of his illness from his family. His family did not know about his diagnosis and had not even heard of AIDS until coming across an article on the disease in The New York Times about a month before his death. Don Heche died from AIDS-related complications on March 3, 1983, aged 45. In a 1998 interview, Anne reflected that her father being closeted ultimately "destroyed his happiness and our family. But it did teach me to tell the truth. Nothing else is worth anything."

Three months after her father's death, Anne's 18-year-old brother Nathan was killed in a car crash when his vehicle missed a curve and struck a tree. The remainder of her immediate family subsequently moved to Chicago to be closer to other family members. Anne, her mother, and her older sister Abigail, who had left college, were all living together in a one-bedroom apartment, which lacked privacy and which Heche would compare to living in a dorm room.

Heche attended the progressive Francis W. Parker School, where she continued to be active in theater, performing in such plays as Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth and Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead. When she was aged 16, a talent scout spotted her in a school play and invited her to audition for the daytime soap opera As the World Turns. Heche flew to New York City with her mother, auditioned, and was offered a part. She was not able to accept the offer, as it would have entailed moving with her family to New York in the middle of her school year and having her mother leave a new job at a brokerage firm. In her memoir, Heche notes that she really wanted to move out on her own and "escape [her] mother's grasp", but this was not an option while she was still a minor.

In 1987, at the end of her senior year, Heche was offered another audition, this time for the soap opera Another World. She was offered a role after two auditions and accepted, in spite of her mother's opposition. She moved to New York City and started work on the series, in her debut television role, just days after her high school graduation. In a later interview she stated, "I did my time with my mom in a one-bedroom, skanky apartment and I was done."