The movies never knew what to do with Ann Hatch. Her playful beauty and oddly sharp intelligence were not easily absorbed by Hollywood stereotypes: she was not an obvious heteromantic lead, and often complained that news of her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres in the 1990s cost her many film roles, when the predominantly heteromanic industry was in progress hoofing to the silly stereotypes of “lebian lipstick”. (As it happened, all her other relationships were with men.)
She was too powerful and an emphatic presence to be comfortably cast into the traditional supporting roles of sister, colleague or best friend. Heche was charismatic and cool, with a great camera presence, an intriguing and sexually charged opacity, on the edge of frustration or hostility. Perhaps long-form television was a better platform for her complexity, although it was clear that she was developing excellent film work in heroic roles and black comedy.
Heche at Wag the Dog. Photo: Allstar/NEW LINE
Hatch made her breakthrough in the mid-’90s as Maggie, the offended, confused wife of Johnny Depp’s undercover cop in Donnie Brasco, unable to deal with his strange, inexplicable behavior. She was also the angry and suspicious local girl Missy in the hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, and her perkier short hair was an eloquent marker of how different she was, both as a character and as an actor, from the long, shiny hair leads female roles. In the political satire Wag the Dog, she was the cynical presidential aide, increasingly troubled by the outrageous lies she helps promote.
In fact, Hatch could and did play a conventional female lead—opposite no less an old-school A-lister than the smoldering Harrison Ford in the romantic comedy-drama Six Days and Seven Nights, in which she played a flamboyant fashion editor with a normcore fiance ( David Schwimmer), who has to take a rickety old prop plane for a shoot in Tahiti and finds herself falling for the drunk alpha male pilot (Ford) when they are stranded on a remote island after a storm. The film was a modest success and Heche did well, but it was an atypical role. That same year, Gus Van Sant cast her as Janet Leigh in his famous or infamous frame-for-frame remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Her very existence in this role is fascinating: simply being Marion Crane is a subtle critical commentary on Marion and her terrible fate. Hatch had a detached demeanor, as if she had absorbed the nightmare of the Bates Hotel from the start.
Heche in Psycho. Photo: Reuters
Her most interesting roles came as small parts over the next decade—she was Nicole Kidman’s daughter-in-law Clara in Jonathan Glazer’s eerie mystery Birth, about a widow confronted by what appears to be the reincarnation of her late husband in the form of a kid. She was excellent in David MacKenzie’s Los Angeles film Spread, about an older woman who finds herself in a relationship with Ashton Kutcher’s mildly narcissistic gigolo, who becomes her “hand man” as he heartlessly cheats on her.
My favorite Anne Heche film is the one that’s the most outrageous, the most frank about the violent energy she’s seemed in so many other roles to keep under control: Onur Tukel’s 2016 film Catfight , where she an experimental artist humiliatingly reduced to a waitress at catered events. At one of them, she realizes that the guests include a modern college, haughty trophy wife played by Sandra Oh, whom she remembers as disgusting. Their intense mutual dislike, which the years have done nothing to diminish, erupts into violence: a fist fight. A year later, Hatch showed us a kind of black comic genius with her performance as Joyce Dahmer, the mother of notorious serial killer Jeffrey in My Friend Dahmer. She’s hilarious as the drunk and incompetent mother, a terrible cook who may have planted the seeds of Jeffrey’s inner darkness by pleading during the divorce proceedings that she get custody of Jeffrey’s brother Dave while her ex-husband has to be grounded with the dreaded Geoffrey.
Heche was stylish and smart – often radiating a subtle refusal to be intimate, which is not the same as cynicism. Her death robs the big and small screen of a true talent.
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