A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed last Thursday that a blood test showed Heche was under the influence of narcotics when she crashed. Another law enforcement source told The Los Angeles Times that Heche’s initial blood test revealed cocaine in her system.

A native of Ohio whose family moved around the country, Heche endured an abusive and tragic childhood, one that helped push her into acting as a way of escaping her own life.

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She showed enough early promise to be offered professional work in high school and first came to prominence on the NBC soap opera Another World from 1987 to 1991, winning a Daytime Emmy Award for the role of twins Marley and Vicky Hudson, who on the show sustained injuries that anticipated Heche’s: Vicky falls into a coma for months after a car crash.

By the late 1990s Heche was one of the hottest actors in Hollywood, a constant on magazine covers and in big-budget films. In 1997 alone, she played opposite Johnny Depp as his wife in Donnie Brasco and Tommy Lee Jones in Volcano and was part of the ensemble cast in the original I Know What You Did Last Summer.

The following year, she starred with Ford in Six Days, Seven Nights and appeared with Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix in Return to Paradise. She also played one of cinema’s most famous murder victims, Marion Crane of Psycho, in Gus Van Sant’s remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic, and co-starred in the indie favourite Walking and Talking.

Around the same time, her personal life led to even greater fame, and both personal and professional upheaval.

She met Ellen DeGeneres at a the 1997 Vanity Fair Oscar party, in love and began a three-year relationship that made one of Hollywood’s first openly gay couples. But Heche later said her career was damaged by an industry wary of casting her in leading roles. She would remember advisers opposing her decision to have DeGeneres accompany her to the premiere of Volcano.

“We were tapped on the shoulder, put into her limo in the third act and told that we couldn’t have pictures of us taken at the press junket,” Heche said in 2018 on the podcast Irish Goodbye.

After she and DeGeneres parted, Heche had a public breakdown and would speak candidly of her mental health struggles.

In the fall of 2000, soon after her break-up with DeGeneres, Heche was hospitalised after knocking on the door of a stranger in a rural area near Fresno, 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 battles. During a 2001 interview with TV journalist Barbara Walters, Heche recounted in painful detail alleged sexual abuse by her father, Donald Heche, who professed to be devoutly religious and died in 1983 from complications of Aids.

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Heche described her suffering as so extreme she developed a separate personality and imagined herself descended from another planet.

In the final days of his life, Heche said, she learned he was secretly gay and that she believed his inability to live honestly fuelled his anger and hurtful behaviour. Not longer her father died, her brother Nathan – one of her four siblings – was killed in a car crash.

“I’m not crazy. But it’s a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me,” Heche told Walters. In an effort to escape the past, “I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life.”

Additional reporting by Tribune News Service and Reuters