Category: Entertainment

The family of Anne Heche say the US actor is “not expected to survive” a severe collision that left her vehicle engulfed in flames last Friday.

In a statement, Heche’s family said through a representative that she had suffered “a severe anoxic brain injury” and was now being kept on life support to determine whether her organs were viable for donation.

The family said it had “long been her choice” to donate her organs.

“We want to thank everyone for their kind wishes and prayers for Anne’s recovery and thank the dedicated staff and wonderful nurses that cared for Anne at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills hospital,” the statement read.

“Unfortunately, due to her accident, Anne Heche suffered a severe anoxic brain injury and remains in a coma, in critical condition. She is not expected to survive.”

“Anne had a huge heart and touched everyone she met with her generous spirit,” the statement added. “More than her extraordinary talent, she saw spreading kindness and joy as her life’s work — especially moving the needle for acceptance of who you love. She will be remembered for her courageous honesty from her and dearly missed for her light from her.

On Thursday, police told CNN that they were investigating whether Heche was impaired at the time of the incident following a blood draw but that “additional testing is required to rule out any substances that were administered in the hospital,” officer Annie Hernandez said.

He crashed her car into a house in the Mar Vista area of ​​Los Angeles, near her own home, at speed on Friday. The collision caused a fire that took an hour to extinguish, according to reports.

The occupant of the house escaped without injury; Neighbors told Fox News that the car had ploughed right through the house. “The windows were broken, so I opened the back door of the car. [Heche] answered and said she was not OK, so that was tough. I know they didn’t get her out of the car until the fire was pretty much put out.”

Heche, 53, is known for her work on films including the remake of Psycho, Donnie Brasco and Cedar Rapids.

Press Association contributed to this report.

Rachel Zegler, the actor who rose to fame as the lead in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, has spoken up in support of intimacy coordinators, after criticism of the role by Sean Bean earlier in the week.

Speaking to the Times, Bean said such coordinators – largely brought in post #MeToo to help police on-set safety – can “spoil the spontaneity” of shooting a sex scene.

“It would inhibit me more because it’s drawing attention to things,” Bean said. “Somebody saying: ‘Do this, put your hands there, while you touch his thing.”

“I think the natural way lovers behave would be ruined by someone bringing it right down to a technical exercise,” he added. Bean, who starred in Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, compared recent experiences to his time shooting a 1993 TV adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover opposite Joely Richardson.

“Lady Chatterley was spontaneous,” Bean said. “It was a joy. We had a good chemistry between us, and we knew what we were doing was unusual. Because she was married, I was married. But we were following the story. We were trying to portray the truth of what DH Lawrence wrote.”

Writing on Twitter, Zegler took issue with Bean’s position, saying intimacy coordinators “establish an environment of safety for actors” and that “spontaneity in intimate scenes can be unsafe. Wake up.”

She expressed her gratitude to the coordinator who worked with her and Ansel Elgort on West Side Story, saying “they showed grace to a newcomer like myself + educated those around me who’ve had years of experience.”

The Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theater Union issued a statement saying they found it “disappointing to hear these comments from such a screen favorite and established actor without acknowledging his position of privilege and the vulnerabilities and challenges many in the industry, particularly young and less experienced actors, may face as they engage in shooting intimate scenes.”

Added Bectu head Philippa Childs:

“Intimacy coordination provides vital support for artists during the preparation, rehearsal and shooting of intimate action and its increasing use is a welcome move to further establish an environment of safety for actors on set.

“These comments display a disservice to intimate co-ordinators and to the knowledge and contributions of the trained, skilled professionals our members who carry out this work are. We applaud their commitment to keeping everyone safe and respected on set.”

Bean had also criticized post-shoot editing of intimate scenes, saying that he was saddened to see sexual sequences involving himself, co-star Lena Hall and a mango had been cut from TV series Snowpiercer.

“Often the best work you do, where you’re trying to push the boundaries, and the very nature of it is experimental, gets censored when TV companies or the advertisers say it’s so much,” said Bean. “It’s a nice scene, quite surreal, dream-like and abstract. And mango-esque.”

Asked about the origins of intimacy coordinators, who are seeking to protect vulnerable actors, Bean said: “I suppose it depends on the actress. This one [meaning Hall] had a musical cabaret background, so she was up for anything.”

Hall, who has starred in Broadway productions of Kinky Boots, Cats and Hedwig and the Angry Inch responded by saying that Bean is “an awesome actor and made me feel not only comfortable but also like I had a true acting partner in those bizarre scenes. ”

She added: “If I feel comfortable with my scene partner and with others in the room then I won’t need an intimacy coordinator. BUT if there is any part of me that is feeling weird, gross, over exposed etc … I will either challenge the necessity of the scene or I’ll want an IC [intimacy coordinator].”

Other actors who took issue with Bean’s stance include The Good Place’s Jameela Jamil, who tweeted that sex scenes “should only be technical. It’s like a stunt. Our job as actors is to make it not look technical. Nobody wants an impromptu grope.”

Representatives for Bean said the actor declined to comment further.

In an interview published on Tuesday in Porter magazine, Amanda Seyfried, the Mamma Mia! actor who was Oscar nominated two years ago for her role as Ella in David Fincher’s Mank, said she regretted the lack of intimacy coordinators when she was beginning her career as Ella.

Seyfried said she emerged “pretty unscathed” from her early days as an actor in Hollywood, but reflects on her early experiences with shock at herself and disappointment with others.

“Being 19, walking around without my underwear on – like, are you kidding me? How did I let that happen? Seyfried said. “Oh, I know why: I was 19 and I didn’t want to upset anybody and I wanted to keep my job. That’s why.”

Speaking to the Guardian earlier this year, the director Adrian Lyne also expressed ambivalence about intimacy coordinators.

“It implies a lack of trust. And that’s all I have. If the actors don’t trust me, I might as well go home. I’ve gotta make myself vulnerable for them; for them to know I would spill my guts, do anything for them. Then, with any luck, I get the same back.”

I have contrasted shooting his most recent film, Deep Water, starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, who began a relationship on set, with making Fatal Attraction in the 1980s.

The stars of that film, Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, swigged champagne before their first sex scene, and margaritas before their second. “You can’t do that now!” said Lyne. “Why is everything so serious? God, it’s not like they’re gonna get paralyzed or something.”

Years before I first met Lindsey Mendick, I knew more intimate details of her life than I did those of my oldest friends. I knew about her past relationships of her: open and clandestine; coercive and crushing. I knew about her sex with her exes, how she felt about her body, and theirs. I knew about her partner de ella, the artist Guy Oliver, and her de ella vampire fantasies de ella (a card of Guy-as-a-vampire making love to Mendick is stuck to my fridge). I knew she suffered from polycystic ovary syndrome, and that it made her hirsute (which she hated) and possibly infertile (about which she was ambivalent).

I knew all this because of her art, which is ruthlessly, brutally honest about topics other people swerve even on a cabernet-lubricated girls’ night in. People react strongly to her work. Since moving to Margate during the pandemic, Mendick has become close to Tracey Emin, which she figures her. There’s a shared sensibility: if you’re going to mine personal experience, why hold back? (Except, Mendick will try to persuade me later, she does hold back.)

Off With Her Head, her latest show, explores the vilification of powerful women, from Medusa to Meghan Markle. It opens with Anne Boleyn, lifesize, kneeling in prayer ahead of her execution de ella, with video of Mendick’s face superimposed as she confesses her de ella “sins”: a lipstick sample stolen; cold pasta eaten from the bin; bags for life unscanned at the checkout. There’s heavy stuff, too: binging and purging, and the obsessive thought disorder that periodically floods Mendick’s brain with horrific visions.

Navigating the exhibition at Carl Freedman’s gallery in Margate, I spot Mendick’s mermaid-blue bob as she searches for me between possessed vases, demon cats and thick pub fixtures. She greets me with a hug. We’re deposited in a cool office room by gallery director Robert Diament – ​​a friend of Mendick – who offers us choc-ices.

Did she consciously decide to open up her life to her art or is that just how she is? “I feel like the honesty is quite protective,” Mendick says, as we settle into opposite corners of a giant sofa. “If everyone feels you’re being honest about one thing then you can keep the real darkness at bay.”

Those bad thoughts she shares as she recounts her sins? They’re a sanitized version. The reality, she tells me, is far worse.

Her confessional turning point was the 2019 show The Ex Files – a love letter to the corporate environments she worked in as a younger woman. Mendick built an office with cottage-cheese-print wallpaper, decorated it with sculptures of glazed donuts and kinky leather furniture, and shared the story of her past relationships in ceramic sticky notes on the walls (“You choosing me made me feel like I existed ”; “You were surprisingly kind and effortlessly cruel”; “I don’t have to forgive you”). As she puts it: “I burned all my relationships in the kiln.” She didn’t expect them to be read, but they were. It turned out that sharing intimate details of her life from her and receiving affirmation for it was “quite addictive”.

Mendick’s corporate years started when she was struggling with her mental health: her dad found a role for her at his office. Her family de ella still looms large: her mum de ella was a children’s clothes designer for places such as Woolworths, C & A and British Home Stores. The artist designed custom fabric and wallpaper with her mum de ella for Off With Her Head, a floral pattern decorated with scolds ‘bridles.

Mendick credits her mum with introducing her to sculpture, albeit via the unusual medium of cake. Among her mother’s fondant-iced masterpieces of her, she remembers one made for a neighbor turning 18: “She made him in the bath, with a beer.” Her sister de ella also started making cakes: the love they garnered did not escape Mendick’s notice de ella. “So when my friends were turning 18, I started making them,” she tells me. “I was the worst at it out of the three of us.” She has since realized fondant icing is much trickier than clay: “The stickiness, the sugar, the way that it starts melting, and one color bleeds into another. Clay is a piece of piss compared to that.”

Some of Mendick’s sculpture plays with the conventions of traditional ceramics. There are ornate glazed vases ripped from within by claws, skeleton hands or octopus tentacles. Toby jugs shaped like her severed head from her. Figurines of smoking, red-eyed rodents. She also reimagines homely objects. In Hairy on the Inside, the show about polycystic ovary syndrome, she modeled classic kids’ toys (among them Mr Potato Head and Sylvanian Families) beset by bulging cysts and werewolf snouts. Ceramic sculpture is her primary medium, but it is presented within a fully realized world. For Hairy on the Inside, she built an ob/gyn waiting room populated by anxious werewolves. For Off With Her Head, she has made a pub, with custom beer mats and a pole-dancing platform.

Drama is comprehensive. Mendick wants you to gasp at the big reveal, like a homeowner shown their master bedroom on an interior design show. She wants to overwhelm you with detail, camp and pop culture references. Her “more, more, more” sensibility is a product of the “bawdy culture” she grew up in, she thinks. “As a child of the 90s, there was so much over the top reaction: Euro 96, Princess Diana dying, the Spice Girls, fandom. Everything was huge, everyone showed emotions. Everything was about the party: from Live & Kicking to TFI Friday.”

As we talk, I’m frequently aware that she’s teetering between wanting to please and wanting not to care. Mendick has the courage to be outspoken, outrageous, full-on, but she is tormented with self-doubt and anxiety. The overwhelming installations she constructs derive from this cycle: “I’m conscious of taking up people’s time, and I feel guilty about that,” she says. So in return, “I want you to see how much time I’ve put in, that it means the world to me, that I’m not blasé: it’s part of my soul and what I believe in.”

The relationship with Oliver has been transformative, personally and artistically. They share a dog – Telly the pug – and a not-for-profit gallery called Quench. Oliver’s film-making skills have brought video into Mendick’s work from him. For Hairy on the Inside, I filmed her mouth and chin in closeup as she drank a glass of red wine. This was at the end of lockdown: she’d been unable to access hair-removal treatment. As she described bullying, insecurity and her mixed feelings about the pressure to be body positive, she drew viewers’ attention to the red wine catching her in the hair on her top lip.

The list of confessions in Off With Her Head concludes with Mendick sharing petty annoyances with Oliver, before explaining how awkward it felt to say that with him behind the camera. At one point she says: “I hate him so much, like when he walks really slowly into a restaurant, or corrects a word when he knows the word that I actually meant.” I am astounded by the way they navigate this as a couple. The complexities of their relationship are explored in Mendick’s upcoming work Till Death Do Us Part, made for the Hayward Gallery’s autumn show Strange Clay. There, rodents fight battles across various domestic interiors: if our home is our castle, says Mendick “those castles are our domain where we create the laws”. They are also the sites of concealed battles and arguments.

The warped lens of social media places Mendick in the inner circle of a tight Margate scene that centers on Tracey Emin, together with gallerist Carl Freedman (a curator important to the rise of the YBAs), Robert Diament and Russell Tovey. Also in the orbit are Mendick’s close friend Rebecca Lucy Taylor (AKA singer-songwriter Self Esteem) and the younger artists who pass through Quench gallery. This pally cluster performs like an extended family, populating one another’s podcasts and Instagram feeds. Taylor and Mendick bubbled during the pandemic, sharing tracks and artworks as the former worked towards a new album and the latter an exhibition.

Emin has been a huge influence, as an artist, and now as a friend. “Everything changed when she came into my life,” says Mendick, for whom the line between friendship and fandom is endearingly blurred. The periodic vilification Emin has endured makes the artist something of a patron saint for Off With Her Head. “Cancel culture is just the newest incarnation of tabloids and the public shaming of women: it’s always been there.” Emin features in the show in a ceramic diorama, naked among her paintings by her.

Less immediately visible in the show, but evident throughout our conversation, is how women internalize this threat of vilification, and the pressure to be quiet, compliant and pleasing. This is the battle within: the conditioning Mendick fights, even as she appears to tell all.