PROFILE

Anne Heche

Anne Heche was a lesbian; now she's married with a two-year-old son. She was crazy, even thinking she was God; now she's back to being a mere mortal. Marianne Macdonald talks to the actress

Anne Heche is the Hollywood star whose breakdown transfixed America. She drove her car out of Los Angeles, stopped 200 miles later near the city of Fresno, got out and wandered in shorts and a bra a mile and a half across broiling dirt fields until she reached a small farmhouse. Inside she asked the startled inhabitants for a glass of water, then took a shower. When she put on a pair of Mickey Mouse slippers and mentioned she was waiting for a spaceship to take her to heaven, they began to get worried. They called the police, who carted her to hospital.

That was in August 2000, the day after Heche (pronounced Haytch) split up with her girlfriend of three and a half years, Ellen DeGeneres. They'd been the world's most famous lesbian couple, swanning off to nuzzle each other next to President Clinton at the White House, buying large houses in LA and telling anyone who would listen that they wanted to get married. They met when the blonde DeGeneres was at the height of her fame, fronting the comedy television show Ellen, and Heche was clambering into the Hollywood A-list - she had co-starred with Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco (1997), with Robert De Niro in Wag the Dog (1997), and with Joaquin Phoenix in Return to Paradise (1998). Though all her previous relationships had been heterosexual (her exes included Steve Martin) she fell in love with DeGeneres at first sight. Four days later Heche took DeGeneres to the première of her flim Volcano against the advice of both their agents. Their careers juddered to a halt, and the pair went on a lot of chat shows complaining about it.After things imploded in August 2000 Heche wrote a very brave autobiography, Call Me Crazy, claiming her father had abused her as a child. He had been a closet homosexual and one of the first people known to die of Aids, in 1983. She also said that from the age of about 25 she had led a double life as a person called 'Celestia' who thought she was God. As if this was all getting too weird, even for her, she then turned round and married a cameraman five years her junior called Coleman Laffoon and had a son called Homer.

	Heche and husband Coleman Laffoon

That was two years ago and America has only just stopped talking about it. Now, undaunted, the 34-year-old has popped her head back over the parapet. I am about to talk to Heche in the fashionable Mercer Hotel in New York; she is promoting her new play, a revival of Hecht and MacArthur's 1930 comedy Twentieth Century, which opens at the Roundabout Theatre on 42nd Street next month. This is the culmination of three years spent determinedly trying to salvage her career. The actress who in 1998 co-starred in Six Days Seven Nights with Harrison Ford has had to go down several rungs, doing a series of guest appearances in Ally McBeal, among other things. In Twentieth Century she co-stars with Alec Baldwin - who is also trying to make a comeback.