US actress Anne Heche is in hospital following an accident in which her car smashed into a house and flames erupted.
“Anne is currently in stable condition,” Heather Duffy Boylston, Heche’s friend and podcast partner, said in a statement on Saturday.
“Her family and friends ask for your thoughts and prayers and to respect her privacy during this difficult time.”
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Another source close to Heche told CNN “she’s lucky to be alive” and has severe burns.
The source said Heche should expect a long recovery ahead.
Heche’s car rammed into a garage, before speeding off and driving into a house in Los Angeles’ Westside shortly before 11AM on Friday, police said.
The car came to a stop inside the two-storey house and erupted in flames.
The fire took nearly 60 firefighters more than an hour to douse, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Footage showed a blue Mini Cooper Clubman, badly damaged and burned, being towed out of the home, with Heche sitting up on a stretcher and struggling as she was put in an ambulance.
She was originally in a ‘critical condition’, but friends have now said the actress is stable.
Police are still investigating the incident, however so far no other injuries have been reported, and no arrests have been made.
According to CNN, authorities are yet to question Heche about the circumstances of the incident due to the significant nature of her injuries.
She first came to prominence on the soap opera Another World from 1987 to 1991, in which she won a Daytime Emmy Award for the role.
In the late 1990s she became one of the hottest stars in Hollywood, a constant on magazine covers and in big-budget films.
She co-starred with Johnny Depp in 1997’s Donnie Brasco; with Tommy Lee Jones in 1997’s Volcano; with Harrison Ford in 1998’s Six Days, Seven Nights; with Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix in 1998’s Return To Paradise, and with an ensemble cast in the original 1997 I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres from 1997 to 2000 heightened her fame and brought immense public scrutiny.
In the autumn of 2000 soon after the two broke up, Heche was hospitalized after knocking on the door of a stranger in a rural area in California.
Authorities said she had appeared shaken and disoriented, and spoke incoherently to the residents.
In a memoir released the following year, Call Me Crazy, Heche talked about her lifelong struggles with mental health and a childhood of abuse.
She was married to camera operator Coleman Laffoon from 2001 to 2009, with whom she had a son.
He has another son with actor James Tupper, her co-star on the TV series Men In Trees.
Heche has worked consistently in smaller films, on Broadway, and on TV shows in the past two decades.
She recently had recurring roles on the network series Chicago PD and All Rise, and in 2020 was a contestant on Dancing With The Stars.
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