Anne Celeste Heche (pronounced /ˈheɪtʃ/; born May 25, 1969) is an American actress, director and screenwriter.

Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio, the daughter of Nancy and Donald Heche. Her father was an organist, church founder, Baptist minister, and choir director. In her book, Call Me Crazy, she claimed that her father molested her during her childhood, giving her herpes. Her father later disclosed his homosexuality to his family before dying of AIDS in 1983. In that same year, Heche's older brother Nate, who was also an actor, was killed in a car accident just a few months before his graduation from high school. Heche was a noted actress even at Francis W. Parker School, in Chicago, and the soap opera As the World Turns offered her a contract in 1985, when she was 16. However, both she and her mother felt it best that she finish high school first.

Immediately after her high school graduation, Heche landed her first major TV role, that of good and evil twins Vicky and Marley on the NBC soap opera Another World. Heche made quite an impression with the complicated dual role, earning Daytime Emmy and Soap Opera Digest Awards. Heche taped her final episode of Another World in 1991 and the following year made a significant TV film debut alongside Jessica Lange in the Golden Globe-nominated adaptation of Willa Cather’s O’ Pioneers. She made her feature debut as Mary Jane Wilks in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1993) and gradually landed larger roles in I'll Do Anything (1994) and TV movies Against the Wall (1994) and Kingfish: A Story of Huey Long (1995), playing the notorious Southern politician's mistress.