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Well-Rounded Actress Anne Heche’s Career Has Taken Her From Dinner Theater At Age 12 To Starring Movie Roles

Beth Pinsker The Dallas Morning News

Think Anne Heche is just another Hollywood discovery of the moment thanks to her disaster-girl turn in “Volcano”?

Think again.

The subject makes the 27-year-old actress almost as steamed as the lava licking her toes in the new disaster thriller. She erupts in profanity, then calms a bit.

“People tend to forget what I’ve done before I was visible,” she says. “I think that happens with a lot of actors. They’re on Broadway or something, and they come out and then they get discovered, and it’s a bunch of malarkey. But that’s part of this business, too. You work and then you get noticed and that’s one of the brilliant things because then more doors open … and then people can pronounce my name right.”

Heche (which is, for the record, pronounced Haytch) has been a professional since age 12, when she started acting in dinner theater in New Jersey to help support her family. She landed on the NBC soap “Another World” at 17, fresh out of high school in Chicago, and won two daytime Emmys for her role as twins Vicky and Marley Love.

“She was the most intuitive actress I ever saw work before,” says Tom Eplin, the actor who played the love interest of both her soap characters. “She had no fear. I think her work now speaks for itself. She’s already a movie star; she was destined to do it. She’s as well-rounded an actress as you can be, and she was that at an early age.”

Since making the leap to feature films in 1993’s “‘The Adventures of Huck Finn,” Heche has done TV movies, including the recent HBO abortion drama “If These Walls Could Talk,” and has had sizable big-screen roles in “I’ll Do Anything,” “Milk Money,” “Pie in the Sky,” “The Juror,” “Walking and Talking” and the recent “Donnie Brasco.”

In “Volcano,” she’s a feisty seismologist who teams with emergency chief Tommy Lee Jones to save Los Angeles from a deadly volcano that springs out of the La Brea Tar Pits. The tourist trap served nicely as a backdrop for the film’s preview party last month.

Surrounded by pools of pungent slop, in a garden of tropical plants and old bones, Heche looks a lot more comfortable than she does on film, where lava and flying rocks destroy everything around her. She puffs on a cigarette, greets guests and plays with the table’s centerpiece (a promotional pop-up toaster, complete with foam squares emblazoned with the movie’s inescapable slogan, “The Coast Is Toast”).

The atmosphere is slightly surreal. She’s just gotten her first look at clips from the film next door at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. She’s sitting on the exact spot that’s ground zero for the on-screen carnage.

Before shooting “Volcano,” she wasn’t exactly a disaster-film expert - too young for the genre’s ‘70s glory days, too religious for movies in general. Being in the middle of that sort of high-tech production reminded her of her soap-opera days, when her job was to hit her mark, read her lines and get out of the way.

“You just don’t want to screw up your lines on a thing like ‘Volcano,’ because it costs a million dollars, and you do not want to be the cause of a million dollars,” she says.

Funny how being a prop can work wonders for a career. The seemingly inevitable blockbuster, which blasted into theaters Friday, should take Heche to a level where she is no longer just the friend or wife, but can star in her own right. Her next project is “Wag the Dog” with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. She also dabbles in independent film, recently directing and starring in her own short film, “Stripping for Jesus.”

“I wouldn’t ever want to be in one world or another. That’s why I want to be in as many different kinds of films as I can,” she says.

If this young actress sounds more together than most 27-year-olds, it’s for good reason. She has already been through a lot.

“Her childhood is just a press agent’s dream, because it’s so dramatic,” says Anna Stuart, who played her mother on “Another World” and is still a close friend. (Her current life isn’t lacking in drama, either, with tabloids, Newsweek and USA Today speculating on romantic links with Ellen DeGeneres.)

Heche grew up the youngest of four kids in a family that moved a lot as their Baptist-preacher dad started up ministries. When she was 12, her father died of AIDS, and it was revealed that he had been leading a secret gay life. Three months after his death, her 18-year-old brother died in a car accident. The family finances were in shambles, so they all went to work doing what they could. Young Anne could act.

“I think every family has a trauma,” she says. “We got through it the way that any family would. It seems that ours is factually bigger, but I think it has the same effects as any other family situation has. And you learn to grow through them.”

Her positive spin on the saga is this: “In a way, I’m very grateful that I got the big stuff out of the way. Now I can play, because I don’t think the world’s going to dole out much more of that stuff to me. I got it over with.”