When Anne Heche was Jesus
The actress had an eerie religious journey
In 1997, a young blonde woman became a tabloid sensation when she started dating Ellen DeGeneres, the most famous lesbian in the world.
I’m thinking over Anne Heche’s difficult story—so often a religious one. She later said she’d been mentally ill. She’d thought she was a reincarnation of Jesus, named ‘Celestia’, sent to earth to spread a message of love.
They met the evening of March 24, 1997.
Anne went to the Vanity Fair party after the Academy Awards, where The English Patient won ‘best picture’. She recalled later:
“I saw Ellen across a crowded room, not knowing anything at all except how I was just drawn to her. It was very clear from the moment I saw her that this was something more powerful than anything I could have controlled.”
She was 27, 5'5" and heterosexual—or had been?
Ellen was unsure about dating a straight woman a decade younger. But Anne was sure. It seemed a storybook romance, carried out before the mass media. And Evangelical America went on red alert.
