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      Ayo Edebiri and Her Dog Gromit Go to the Bookstore

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      A morning out in Los Angeles with the surprise star of “The Bear” and her Chihuahua mix.LOS ANGELES — Ayo Edebiri has an arresting screen presence because she doesn’t look like she’s acting. In “The Bear,” the frenetic restaurant drama that has been one of the most talked-about shows of the summer, she is usually the calm at the center of the storm.In real life, she’s the same — unassuming, unshowy — and she speaks in an even tone. In other words, she’s not the kind of person who will break into a series of practiced anecdotes when a reporter shows up.On a hot day in Los Angeles, she was standing outside her apartment complex in the Los Feliz neighborhood, waiting for her puppy, Gromit, to do his business. She then picked up what he had left in the grass with a biodegradable green baggy. She looked around for a trash can but couldn’t find one, so she ended up tucking the baggy into her canvas tote.Gromit is a small dog with black and white hair. He is part Chihuahua, part minikin and part terrier, Ms. Edebiri said, adding that she knows the mix because she had his DNA tested.“He’s a melting pot,” she said. “I think he’s the American dream.”Ms. Edebiri, whose first name means joy in Yoruba, grew up in Boston, where she sang in a church choir and appeared in plays put on by the congregation. At 26, after a few years of writing for television and working as a stand-up comic and podcaster, she finds herself becoming known as an actress.“I love doing the show,” she said of “The Bear.” “Even when we were making it, we all felt like it was really special and an honor to do. But also because of that, I think there was this fear that people wouldn’t get it.”Ms. Edebiri plays the sous-chef Sydney Adamu on the critically acclaimed show “The Bear.” FXPeople got it. And they responded to her character, the even-keeled sous-chef Sydney Adamu, a kind of stand-in for every unflappable Gen Z-er who suspects that they might have a better idea of how to run a workplace than their chaotic boss.Gromit started moving toward some broken glass in the street. “That’s glass,” Ms. Edebiri said in her calm voice. “We are not doing that, dude.” She gave the leash the gentlest of tugs, and Gromit heeded her command.Before “The Bear,” Ms. Edebiri liked to make roast chicken for friends. While preparing for her role, she took courses at the Institute of Culinary Education in Pasadena and shadowed several chefs in Chicago and New York. And, yes, she learned how to prepare the cola braised ribs that become an obsession for her character.“I made it a lot,” she said. “There was a lot of practicing. It needs to look real. And if we’re practicing it, you might as well make it taste real.”Ms. Edebiri with Gromit near her home.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesIn addition to her work on “The Bear,” she played Hattie on the AppleTV+ show “Dickinson.” She also provides the voice for Missy Foreman-Greenwald, a biracial girl feeling her way through puberty, on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth.” So far in her acting career, the characters she plays seem to deal with anxiety by putting on a brave front, and they share a quiet confidence.“I don’t have to dig too deep to access that anxiety,” she said.For a time, she said, she was ready to accept that she didn’t have what it takes to be a performer.“I remember singing in the choir and doing plays, and my god-mom, she was like, ‘You know what? This may not be your gift,’” Ms. Edebiri recalled with a laugh. “She was like, ‘You’re good, but this might not be for you.’ I was like, ‘For sure.’”She changed her mind during middle school and high school, she said, when she started doing improv. After that, she went to New York University with the aim of becoming a teacher, only to realize it wasn’t for her. At the behest of some college friends, she started doing stand-up.“I was definitely nervous about the idea of performing alone,” she said. “I didn’t like being onstage and was very nervous at first.”Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAfter a few years spent working in writers’ rooms Ms. Edebiri became known for her work in front of the camera.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAfter graduation, she moved to Los Angeles and wrote for the NBC sitcom “Sunnyside,” the FX series “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Dickinson.” Leaving the comfort of the writers’ room to go in front of the camera was a big adjustment, she said.“It’s weird,” she said. “I look like this, so I might as well look like this. I don’t want to be self-mythologizing, but I do feel like, growing up, on TV, there weren’t a lot of young Black women who I felt actually looked like me or people I knew, or were allowed to have imperfections.”“There’s a lot of Black women on TV in the media,” she continued, “and I feel like we look different, but we also still look like ourselves. I feel like that’s important and beautiful.”She went into Bru, an airy coffee shop, and ordered a lavender lemonade with sparkling water. When asked what she has learned from her various roles, she demurred. “This is like an actress question,” she said. “I’m not used to answering questions like an actor.”Gromit gets V.I.P. treatment at Skylight Books.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesSoon, Ms. Edebiri and Gromit walked into the Skylight Bookstore, an indie shop with a huge ficus tree surrounded by walnut colored shelves. She came across “The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories” by the late Finnish writer, illustrator and comic book author Tove Jansson. She tapped the cover with her index finger, ornamented with a rustic gold signet ring that reads “Libra.”“She rules,” Ms. Edebiri said, picking up the book. “She’s like this incredible lesbian that made the Moomin comics.”As she moved toward the checkout area, Ms. Edebiri was asked if she would like to go back in time and give her younger self some words of advice.“I don’t think I would say anything, because that messes with the rules of time travel,” she said. “Everything you learn is in the time and in the season that you’re supposed to.”Near the cash register, she spotted a cookbook, “Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora,” edited by Bryant Terry. She set Gromit on top of the checkout table — along with the Tove Jansson book — before she squatted down to open the cookbook.Ms. Edebiri and Gromit on a recent morning in Los Angeles.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesWhile she flipped through its pages, her dog was becoming a star of the store. He wagged his tail on the makeshift stage, ears pointed upward, as three store employees fussed over him, petting him and giving his ears a scratch. After Ms. Edebiri set the cookbook near the cash register, one of the workers started reading to Gromit from the Jansson book.“He is loving it,” Ms. Edebiri said with a laugh. More

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      Wolfgang Petersen, Director of ‘Das Boot,’ Is Dead at 81

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      He made it big in Hollywood with box-office hits, but he’s best remembered for a harrowing, Oscar-nominated German film set inside a U-boat in World War II.Wolfgang Petersen, one of a handful of foreign directors to make it big in Hollywood, whose harrowing 1981 war film, “Das Boot,” was nominated for six Academy Awards and became one of Germany’s top-grossing films, died on Friday at his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He was 81.The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to Michelle Bega, a publicist at the agency Rogers & Cowan PMK in Los Angeles. His death was announced on Tuesday.Mr. Petersen was the most commercially successful member of a generation of filmmakers active in West Germany from the 1960s to the ’80s, whose leading lights included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. But he was equally known in Hollywood.Over five decades Mr. Petersen toggled between his native Germany and the United States, directing 29 films, many of them box-office hits like the 1990s political thrillers “In the Line of Fire,” with Clint Eastwood, and “Air Force One,” with Harrison Ford.With a knack for genre filmmaking — action films were another strong suit — he also made forays into fantasy “(The NeverEnding Story”), sword-and-sandal epic (“Troy’) and science fiction — all while attracting marquee names to star in them, like Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak,” Brad Pitt in “Troy” and George Clooney in “The Perfect Storm.”Jürgen Prochnow, right, played a U-boat captain in “Das Boot.” It’s considered among the finest antiwar films ever made.Columbia PicturesFor all his success in Hollywood, however, “Das Boot,” a tense drama about sailors on a German U-boat during World War II, is the work for which Mr. Petersen will mostly likely be remembered. In the English-speaking world, that frequently mispronounced title alone (“Boot” is spoken exactly like the English “boat”) has attained a kind of pop-cultural status, thanks to references on “The Simpsons” and other TV shows.“‘Das Boot’ isn’t just a German film about World War II; it’s a German naval adventure epic that has already been a hit in West Germany,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times when the film opened in the U.S. in early 1982.The movie won high praise for its historical accuracy and the clammy, claustrophobic effect achieved by the cinematographer Jost Vacano, who shot most of the interior scenes with a small hand-held Arriflex camera. Although the critical response in Germany was divided, with some accusing the film of glorifying war, it encountered a more uniformly positive response abroad. Nowadays it is considered among the finest antiwar films ever made.“Das Boot” (also titled “The Boat” in English-speaking countries) grossed over $80 million worldwide, and though it did not win an Academy Award, its six Oscar nominations — including two for Mr. Petersen, for direction and screenplay, and one for Mr. Vacano, for cinematography — remain a record for a German film production. (It was not nominated in the best-foreign-language-film category; West Germany’s submission that year was Mr. Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” which did not make the Academy’s short list for the Oscar).Mr. Petersen in 1997 with the director’s cut of “Das Boot.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Petersen prepared various versions of “Das Boot” over the next decade and a half. In 1985, German TV broadcast a 300-minute version (twice as long as the theatrical release), which Mr. Petersen claimed was closer to his original vision but commercially unfeasible at the time.After “Das Boot,” he teamed up with the producer Bernd Eichinger, whose fledgling studio, Constantin Film, co-produced the English-language “The NeverEnding Story,” an adaptation of a 1979 fantasy novel by the best-selling German children’s author Michael Ende.Released in 1984, “The NeverEnding Story,” about a bullied boy who enters into an enchanted book, was another-box office hit in Germany and abroad — although it, too, received its share of negative reviews, including from The Times’s film critic Vincent Canby, who called it “graceless” and “humorless.”Despite a tepid U.S. box-office return, which Mr. Petersen chalked up to the film’s being “too European,” “The NeverEnding Story” became a cult favorite over the decades, for its trippy production design, scrappy special effects and synth-heavy theme song, written by Giorgio Moroder and sung by the British pop singer Limahl.The film was mostly shot at Bavaria Film Studio, near Munich, where present-day visitors can ride Falcor, the “luck dragon” that Mr. Canby compared to “an impractical bath mat.” (The studio’s theme park, Bavaria FilmStadt, also offers tours of the submarine from “Das Boot.”)Mr. Petersen with Clint Eastwood on the set of “In the Line of Fire,” in which Mr. Eastwood played a Secret Service agent trying to prevent a presidential assassination. Bruce McBroom/Sygma via Getty ImagesWolfgang Petersen was born on March 14, 1941, in Emden, in Northern Germany. His father was a naval lieutenant in World War II who later worked for a shipping company in Hamburg.Growing up in the immediate postwar period, the young Mr. Petersen idolized America and American movies. On Sundays he would go to matinee screenings for children at the local cinema to see westerns directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford and starring Gary Cooper and John Wayne.“I got to know the medium of film when I was 8 years old, and I was immediately enthusiastic about it,” he told Elfriede Jelinek, a future Nobel Prize winner for literature, in a 1985 interview for German Playboy. “When I was 11, I decided I wanted to become a film director.”In 1950, his family moved to Hamburg, and when Wolfgang was 14, his father gave him an eight-millimeter film camera for Christmas.After graduating from high school, Mr. Petersen was exempted from compulsive military service because of a spine curvature. In the early 1960s, he worked as an assistant director at the Junges Theater (now the Ernst Deutsch Theater) in Hamburg. He then studied theater in Hamburg and Berlin for several semesters before enrolling at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin, West Germany’s first film school, which opened in 1966.In 1970, his graduation film, “I Will Kill You, Wolf,” was picked up by West German television, and this led to a directing offer for the long-running German crime series “Tatort.”Mr. Petersen, right, on the set of “Poseidon,” a 2006 remake of the 1972 movie “The Poseidon Adventure.” Claudette Barius/Warner Brothers PicturesOver the next decade, Mr. Petersen worked at a feverish pace, directing for both television and the big screen, starting in 1974 with the psychological thriller “One or the Other of Us.”From the beginning, audience approval was of central importance to him. “I crouched in the cinema to see how the audience would react” to one particular film, he recalled in the Playboy interview. “And what happened? People walked out of the film. I was devastated. Because I’m obsessed with making films for everyone.”He often succeeded, with popular early-career thrillers that tackled thorny political and social issues. “Smog” (1972) dealt with the effects of pollution in the Ruhr, the industrial region in Northwest Germany. “The Consequence” (1977) was controversial for its frank depiction of homosexuality, a taboo topic at the time.He was married to the German actress Ursula Sieg from 1970 to 1978. He later married Maria-Antoinette Borgel, whom he had met on the set of “Smog,” where she worked as a script supervisor.He is survived by his wife as well as a son from his first marriage, Daniel, a filmmaker, and two grandchildren.Mr. Petersen had nearly 20 films to his credit by the time he made “Das Boot.” A triumph that few, if any, could have predicted, the movie established his international reputation and opened the door to Hollywood.Mr. Petersen with the cast of “Troy” at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2004. With him, from left, were Eric Bana; Saffron Burrows; Sean Bean; Mr. Petersen’s wife, Maria-Antoinette Petersen; Brad Pitt; Jennifer Aniston, who was Mr. Pitt’s wife at the time (and not in the film); Orlando Bloom; and Diane Kruger.Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty ImagesIn his autobiography, “I Love Big Stories” (1997, written with Ulrich Greiwe), Mr. Petersen recalled the first American test screening of “Das Boot” in Los Angeles. At the beginning, the audience of 1,500 applauded when the screen flashed with the statistic that 30,000 Germans onboard U-boats were killed during the war. “I thought: This is going to be a catastrophe!” Mr. Petersen wrote. Two and a half hours later, the film received a thunderous ovation.After “The NeverEnding Story,” Mr. Petersen made “Enemy Mine” (1985), a science fiction film starring Dennis Quaid about a fighter pilot forced to cooperate with a reptilian enemy after they both land on a hostile alien planet. Ms. Maslin called it “a costly, awful-looking science-fiction epic with one of the weirdest story lines ever to hit the screen.”A year later, Mr. Petersen moved to Los Angeles, where he would remain for two decades, working with big stars in a string of mainstream successes that included the political dramas “In the Line of Fire” (1993), about a Secret Service agent’s efforts to prevent a presidential assassination, and “Air Force One” (1997), about the hijacking of the presidential jetliner. There were also the disaster films “Outbreak” (1995), about a deadly virus, “The Perfect Storm” (2000), about commercial New England fishermen caught in a terrifying tempest, and “Poseidon” (2006), a remake of “The Poseidon Adventure,” the 1972 blockbuster about a capsized luxury liner.Mr. Petersen accepted applause during a 25th anniversary celebration of “Das Boot” in Berlin in early 2007. Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesEven at their most commercial, Mr. Petersen’s films often had undercurrents of political commentary. Discussing the “Iliad”-inspired “Troy” (2004), Mr. Petersen drew parallels between Homer’s epic and the reign of George W. Bush. “Power-hungry Agamemnons who want to create a new world order — that is absolutely current,” he told the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.His film career seemed to come full circle in 2016 with “Vier gegen die Bank,” a remake of his 1976 comedy-heist film based on an American novel, “The Nixon Recession Caper,” by Ralph Maloney. It was Mr. Petersen’s first German-language film since “Das Boot” a quarter-century earlier.Throughout his career, he seemed unconcerned by critics who called his artistic merit into question.“If someone asked me whether I felt like an artist, I would have a strange feeling, because I don’t really know,” he once said. “What is an artist? Maybe it’s someone who produces something much more intimate than film, more like a composer or writer or painter.”“My passion,” he added, “is telling a story.” More

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      Anne Heche, Actress Known for ’90s Film Roles, Dies at 53

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      Ms. Heche, who won a Daytime Emmy early in her career and whose films included “Donnie Brasco” and “Wag the Dog,” had been critically injured in a car crash.Anne Heche, an actress who was as well known for her roles in films like “Six Days, Seven Nights” and “Donnie Brasco” as for her personal life, which included a three-year romance with the comedian Ellen DeGeneres, died on Sunday in Los Angeles, nine days after she was in a devastating car accident there. She was 53.Her death was announced by a representative, Holly Baird, who said late Sunday in an email that Ms. Heche had been “peacefully taken off life support.”Ms. Heche was critically injured on Aug. 5 when a Mini Cooper she was driving crashed into a two-story home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, causing a fire that took firefighters more than an hour to extinguish. Ms. Heche, who was alone in the car, sustained burns and a severe anoxic brain injury, caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police said the department was continuing to investigate whether drug use contributed to the accident.A statement released by her publicist on behalf of her family on Thursday night said Ms. Heche had remained in a coma at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles.“It has long been her choice to donate her organs, and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,” the statement said.On Friday, a representative said Ms. Heche had been declared brain-dead on Thursday night.Ms. Heche was a soap opera star before she became known to movie audiences. In the late 1980s, soon after she graduated from high school, she joined the cast of the daytime drama “Another World,” where she played the good and evil twins Vicky Hudson and Marley Love. She won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991 for outstanding younger actress in a drama series.By the mid-1990s, she was a rising star in Hollywood. She played Catherine Keener’s best friend in “Walking and Talking” (1996); Johnny Depp’s wife in “Donnie Brasco” (1997); a presidential aide in the political satire “Wag the Dog” (1997), with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro; and a fashion magazine editor who crash-lands on a South Seas island in an airplane piloted by Harrison Ford in “Six Days, Seven Nights” (1998).Ms. Heche with Dustin Hoffman, left, and Robert De Niro in a scene from the movie “Wag the Dog” (1997).P. Caruso/New Line Cinema“Romantic comedies don’t get more formulaic than this bouncing-screwball valentine, but they don’t get much more delightful, either,” Rita Kempley wrote in her review of “Six Days, Seven Nights” in The Washington Post. “The same goes for Heche and Ford as squabbling opposites drawn together during this tropical adventure.”Ms. Heche began a relationship with Ms. DeGeneres in 1997, at a time when same-sex relationships in Hollywood were not fully accepted. The relationship became widely known in April of that year when they appeared, hand in hand, at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. A few days later, Ms. DeGeneres’s character on her sitcom, “Ellen,” came out as gay.Ms. Heche’s decision to reveal that she was in a lesbian relationship, The New York Times wrote, “confronted Hollywood with a highly delicate problem: how to deal with a gay actress whose career has been built on playing heterosexual roles.”After that relationship ended, Ms. Heche married and later divorced a man, Coleman Laffoon, with whom she had a son, Homer. She also had a son, Atlas Heche Tupper, from her relationship with the actor James Tupper.Remembering Anne Heche (1969-2022)The actress, who appeared in several popular Hollywood films and TV shows, died on Aug. 14, after being critically injured in a car accident.Obituary: Anne Heche started her career as a soap opera star on “Another World.” In the 1990s, she dated Ellen Degeneres, becoming one half of one of Hollywood’s most scrutinized couples.‘Donnie Brasco’: Heche starred in the 1997 gangster film as the wife of an F.B.I. agent who infiltrates a crime family. Read our review of the film.On Stage: The actress made her Broadway debut in 2002, in David Auburn’s Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Proof,” stepping into a coveted female role.Playing It Normal: In 2009, she spoke with The Times about her journey to success, facing professional downturns and making new starts.Complete information on her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Heche told The New York Post in 2021 that she had been “blacklisted” in Hollywood because of her relationship with Ms. DeGeneres.“I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years,” she was quoted as saying. “I was fired from a $10 million picture deal and did not see the light of day in a studio picture.”After she starred in “Six Days, Seven Nights” and in Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” as Marion Crane, the role originally played by Janet Leigh, leading roles in movies largely gave way to guest appearances on television shows like “Ally McBeal” and “Nip/Tuck.”She also starred in the short-lived sitcom “Men in Trees,” had recurring roles on “Everwood” and “Chicago P.D.” and landed a featured part on the HBO series “Hung,” which starred Thomas Jane as a male prostitute.Ms. Heche, right, with Ellen DeGeneres at a fund-raising dinner for the Human Rights Campaign in 1997. They began seeing each other at a time when same-sex relationships in Hollywood were not fully accepted.Win McNamee/ReutersShe appeared on Broadway in the play “Proof” from 2002 until it closed in 2003, then in the 2004 revival of “Twentieth Century,” the 1932 comedy about a Broadway producer (Alec Baldwin) who, as a passenger on the Twentieth Century Limited train, meets a former discovery, Lily Garland (Ms. Heche), who has become a Hollywood star. The role earned Ms. Heche a Tony Award nomination for best performance by a leading actress in a play.In his review in The Times, Ben Brantley wrote, “Her posture melting between serpentine seductiveness and a street fighter’s aggressiveness, her voice shifting between supper-club velvet and dime-store vinyl, Ms. Heche summons an entire gallery of studio-made sirens from the Depression era: Jean Harlow, the pre-mummified Joan Crawford and, yes, Carole Lombard, who famously portrayed Lily in Howard Hawks’s screen version of ‘Twentieth Century.’”In 2004, Ms. Heche was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a mini-series or movie, for her performance in “Gracie’s Choice,” a TV film about a teenager faced with raising her half siblings after their drug-addicted mother is sent to prison.She appeared most recently in the films “The Vanished” (2020), a psychological thriller, and “13 Minutes” (2021), which centers on a tornado, as well as several episodes of the courtroom drama “All Rise.” Ms. Heche with Johnny Depp in “Donnie Brasco” (1997).PhotofestAnne Celeste Heche was born on May 25, 1969, in Aurora, Ohio, to Nancy and Donald Heche. Her father was an evangelical Christian and, it turned out, a closeted gay man. Her first acting role was in a New Jersey dinner theater production of “The Music Man,” which paid her $100 a week.In 1983, after her father died of AIDS, her mother became a Christian therapist and lectured on behalf of James Dobson’s organization Focus on the Family about “overcoming” homosexuality.Ms. Heche wrote in her 2001 memoir, “Call Me Crazy,” about being sexually abused by her father, and about her mother’s denial of that abuse. She said that when she called her mother after years of therapy to confront her about it, her mother ended the conversation by saying, “Jesus loves you, Anne,” before hanging up.Ms. Heche was critically injured on Aug. 5 when the car she was driving crashed into a two-story house in Los Angeles.Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life,” Ms. Heche said in an interview with The Times in 2009. “And it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”In 2018, she said she had been fired from a job at Miramax when she refused to give oral sex to Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced film magnate who founded the company with his brother, Bob, and who was accused of sexual assault by dozens of women. He was convicted of two felony sex crimes in 2020 and is serving a 23-year prison sentence.“If I wasn’t sexually abused as a child, I don’t know if I would have had the strength to stand up to Harvey — and many others, by the way,” she told the podcast “Allegedly … With Theo Von & Matthew Cole Weiss.” “It was not just Harvey, and I will say that.”Vimal Patel More

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      Anne Heche Is Brain-Dead After Crash, Representative Says

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      The actress, 53, was being kept on life support while it was being determined if her organs could be donated, the representative said.The actress Anne Heche, who had been in a coma since a car crash last week, has been declared brain-dead and is being kept on life-support to see if her organs are viable for donation, one of her representatives said Friday.Ms. Heche, 53, was critically injured on Aug. 5 when she crashed the Mini Cooper she was driving into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, the authorities said. She sustained a severe anoxic brain injury and was being treated at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital, according to a statement released on behalf of her family and friends Thursday night.“It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,” the statement said.The declaration of brain death had come Thursday night but “her heart is still beating” on life support, the representative, Holly Baird, said Friday. The search for possible organ recipients could take a few days, even as Ms. Heche’s family and friends put out statements of grief.“Today we lost a bright light, a kind and most joyful soul, a loving mother, and a loyal friend,” her friends and family said in a statement released by Ms. Baird. “Anne will be deeply missed but she lives on through her beautiful sons, her iconic body of work, and her passionate advocacy.”The crash started a fire that took 59 firefighters more than an hour to extinguish, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Ms. Heche was the only person in the car, the authorities said.Jeff Lee, a public information officer with the Los Angeles Police, said an initial blood sample drawn from Ms. Heche at the hospital had revealed “the presence of drugs” but did not say what kind. He said a second test was needed to rule out any substances administered by hospital staff but those results could take “weeks.”In 1991, Ms. Heche won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding younger actress in a drama series, for playing good and evil twins on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”She starred in several popular Hollywood films in the late 1990s, including “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog” and “Six Days Seven Nights.” She continued to have television roles, including on “Men in Trees” in 2006 and “Hung” in 2009, and performed on Broadway, starring in “Proof” in 2002 and “Twentieth Century” in 2004, for which she received a Tony nomination.In his review of “Twentieth Century,” Ben Brantley of The Times wrote of Ms. Heche’s portrayal of Lily Garland, “Her posture melting between serpentine seductiveness and a street fighter’s aggressiveness, her voice shifting between supper-club velvet and dime store vinyl, Ms. Heche summons an entire gallery of studio-made sirens from the Depression era: Jean Harlow, the pre-mummified Joan Crawford and, yes, Carole Lombard, who famously portrayed Lily in Howard Hawks’s screen version of ‘Twentieth Century.’”She has several projects that are in postproduction, according to IMDb, including “Supercell,” a movie with Alec Baldwin, and the HBO show “The Idol.” She had recently finished filming on “Girl in Room 13,” a Lifetime movie that is scheduled to premiere in September, Variety reported.Vimal Patel More

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      Anne Heche ‘Is Not Expected to Survive’ After Crash, Representative Says

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      The actress, 53, has been in a coma since shortly after the car she was in crashed into a Los Angeles home last week, her publicist said in a statement.The actress Anne Heche remained in a coma and was not expected to survive the injuries she sustained in a car crash last week, according to a statement that her publicist released Thursday night on behalf of her family and friends.Ms. Heche, 53, was critically injured on Aug. 5 when the Mini Cooper she was in crashed into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, the authorities said. She suffered a severe anoxic brain injury and was being treated at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital, the family statement said.“It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,” the statement said.The crash started a fire that took 59 firefighters more than an hour to extinguish, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Ms. Heche was the only person in the car, the authorities said.In 1991, Ms. Heche won a Daytime Emmy award for outstanding younger actress in a drama series, for playing good and evil twins on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”She starred in several popular Hollywood films in the late 1990s, including “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog” and “Six Days Seven Nights.” She continued to have television roles, including on “Men in Trees” in 2006 and “Hung” in 2009, and performed on Broadway, starring in “Proof” in 2002 and “Twentieth Century” in 2004, for which she received a Tony nomination.She has several projects that are in postproduction, according to IMDb, including “Supercell,” a movie with Alec Baldwin, and the HBO show “The Idol.” She had recently finished filming on “Girl in Room 13,” a Lifetime movie that is scheduled to premiere in September, Variety reported.Mike Ives More

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      Anne Heche Remains in Critical Condition After Car Crash

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      Ms. Heche, 53, was injured on Friday when the car she was in crashed into a two-story home in Los Angeles, causing severe damage and a fire, the authorities said.The actress Anne Heche remained in a coma, in critical condition and on a ventilator on Wednesday, five days after a car she was in crashed into a home in Los Angeles, a representative said.There had been no change in her condition since Monday, when a different representative, Michael A. McConnell, told Reuters that Ms. Heche had not regained consciousness since shortly after the accident on Friday. “She has a significant pulmonary injury requiring mechanical ventilation and burns that require surgical intervention,” Mr. McConnell said then. Ms. Heche, 53, was critically injured on Friday when the Mini Cooper she was in crashed into a two-story home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, causing severe damage and a fire that took more than an hour to extinguish, the authorities said.A Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman, Officer Norma Eisenman, confirmed earlier this week that Ms. Heche was involved in the crash. The authorities did not say that Ms. Heche was driving, but they did say that she was the car’s only occupant.Ms. Heche was pulled from the car and taken to a hospital with “severe injuries,” the police said.Anne Heche at the Directors Guild of America Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., in March.Jordan Strauss/Invision, via APIt took 59 firefighters and more than an hour to extinguish the fire that started after the crash, the Fire Department said.Officer Rosario Cervantes of the Los Angeles Police Department said on Wednesday that the cause of the crash was part of the investigation and that no charges had been filed. She said that after the crash, a warrant was obtained for a blood sample taken on the day of the crash.“The investigation is ongoing pending the blood result,” Officer Cervantes said.Ms. Heche began her career in daytime television, playing good and evil twins on the NBC soap opera “Another World,” for which she won a Daytime Emmy in 1991 for outstanding younger actress in a drama series.In the late 1990s, she appeared in several popular Hollywood films, co-starring with Johnny Depp in “Donnie Brasco,” Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman in “Wag the Dog” and Harrison Ford in “Six Days Seven Nights.”She had a three-year relationship with the comedian Ellen DeGeneres that ended in 2000.Ms. Heche had roles in several TV shows, including “Men in Trees” in 2006 and “Hung” in 2009. More recent film credits include “The Best of Enemies” (2019), “The Vanished” (2020) and “13 Minutes” (2021). In 2020, she competed on ABC’s “Dancing With The Stars” and was eliminated after four weeks.Livia Albeck-Ripka More

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      in Television

      Jak Knight, Known for ‘Big Mouth’ Netflix Series, Dies at 28

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      Mr. Knight, who was a stand-up comedian, died on Thursday in Los Angeles, his family said.Jak Knight, a stand-up comedian, writer and actor known for his role on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 28.His family on Saturday confirmed his death in a statement that did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Knight had recently finished filming as an actor in the movie “First Time Female Director,” written and directed by Chelsea Peretti.Starting in March, Mr. Knight starred with Chris Redd, Sam Jay and Langston Kerman in the Peacock series “Bust Down,” which he also helped to create. He was also an executive producer on the HBO talk show “Pause with Sam Jay” and was nominated this year for a Writers Guild of America award for his work on the show.From 2017-21, he was a writer and producer for the hit animated sitcom “Big Mouth” and voiced the character Devon. Mr. Knight worked as a writer for the ABC comedy “Black-ish” from 2019-20. His 30-minute Netflix stand-up special aired in 2018 as part of “The Comedy Lineup” series.He was named a 2014 Comedy Central Comic to Watch, a 2015 New Face at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival and an L.A. Comic to Watch by TimeOut in 2018.He opened for various stand-up comedians, including Dave Chappelle, Joel McHale, Eric Andre, Moshe Kasher and Hannibal Buress.Details about his surviving relatives were not immediately available.As news of his death spread, tributes to Mr. Knight appeared on social media.The comedian James Adomian said on Twitter that whenever he was performing with Mr. Knight, he knew it would be a “wildly funny night.”“He was winning big, all of it well deserved, so witty and memorable every moment on stage and off,” he wrote. More

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      in Music

      YoungBoy Never Broke Again Found Not Guilty in Federal Gun Case

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      Lawyers for the rapper argued that he did not know the weapon was in his car when he was pulled over and arrested on a separate warrant in California last year.The chart-topping 22-year-old rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again, born Kentrell D. Gaulden, was found not guilty on Friday of possessing a firearm and ammunition as a felon, concluding one of the two federal gun trials he had been facing.A jury in Los Angeles reached its verdict after about two hours on its second day of deliberations. Mr. Gaulden, who is known to fans as NBA YoungBoy or YB, faced up to 10 years in prison in the case.The gun possession charge in California stemmed from YoungBoy’s March 2021 arrest in the Los Angeles area on a separate federal gun possession warrant from an earlier incident in the rapper’s home state of Louisiana. In September 2020, YoungBoy was among 16 people accused of possessing guns and drugs at a video shoot in Baton Rouge. His lawyers have said none of the contraband was in his possession.Prosecutors in the Central District of California said that upon attempting to execute the warrant in that case, YoungBoy initially seemed to cooperate, pulling over his Mercedes Maybach before taking off again and leading officers on a “high-speed chase.” After the rapper fled on foot, police found an FNX .45 caliber pistol and ammunition behind the front passenger’s seat, along with cash and jewelry.Lawyers for YoungBoy argued that the rapper was unaware of his outstanding federal warrant at the time and panicked when armed officers approached his vehicle, leading him to take off. He did not know the weapon was in the car, they said, and no usable fingerprints or DNA tied YoungBoy to the gun.Prosecutors had sought to link the rapper to the weapon using a photo and video from social media of YoungBoy handling “a gold and tan gun that appeared identical to the firearm recovered from his car,” according to court records. The photo was taken at the same Philadelphia shop that had sold YoungBoy the jewelry also found in the car, they argued. Lawyers for the rapper said the gun was identical to an airsoft replica and could not be confirmed to be the same weapon.“We believe the evidence presented in this case supported the charges brought by the grand jury,” Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, said in a statement. “While we are disappointed with the verdict, we respect the jury’s decision.”As the trial started on Tuesday, the judge in the case, R. Gary Klausner, ruled to exclude lyrics from three YoungBoy songs from being used in court. Prosecutors had said that the tracks — “Gunsmoke,” “Life Support” and “Lonely Child” — referred “to an individual connected to the purchaser of the gun, the gun model found in his car, and the jewelry maker of the jewelry found next to the gun.”But lawyers for the rapper successfully argued that the “hardcore” and “highly inflammatory” rap lyrics would be prejudicial and were not directly relevant, noting that the song mentioning an FN pistol was released before the FN gun seized from the Maybach was purchased.“It’s for entertainment,” they wrote in a court filing. “It is not an admission of other bad acts but it does paint the rappers in a bad light and the jury may infer from the song that Mr. Gaulden is a violent person and take those feelings with them into the deliberation room.”The rapper’s lawyers added: “The real issues are: 1) whether he knew the gun was inside of the car and 2) whether he intended to possess it. It’s a relatively simple case.”Known for his raw reality rap, prolific output and obsessive online fan base, YoungBoy is among the most-streamed artists in the United States so far this year, competing with the likes of Drake and Taylor Swift. Since signing a $2 million deal with Atlantic Records in 2016, he has frequently topped the Billboard album chart — hitting No. 1 with four releases in less than two years — but continues to exist largely outside the mainstream entertainment business, owing in part to his ongoing legal issues.In 2017, YoungBoy pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a firearm and received a suspended 10-year prison sentence, plus probation, stemming from his role in a nonfatal drive-by shooting for which he was originally charged with attempted first-degree murder. In 2019, following subsequent arrests, including for a domestic violence incident in which he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery, the rapper was sentenced to 90 days in jail.Since October, when he was granted a $500,000 bond in the federal gun cases, YoungBoy has lived under home confinement in Utah, where he has continued to record and release music.YoungBoy’s additional federal gun case in Louisiana is ongoing. His lawyers have argued that he was unfairly targeted, highlighting law enforcement’s name for one of its operations: Never Free Again, “an obvious take off on Gaulden’s highly successful music and marketing brand.” The rapper’s legal team has successfully suppressed video evidence in the case that it said was unconstitutionally obtained.The rapper’s arrest in Los Angeles last year, his lawyers said, was a “massive and wildly unnecessary militaristic display of force and intimidation.” More