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

    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

    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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    ‘Fatal Distraction’ Review: Parents Go Through the Unthinkable

    In the documentary by Susan Morgan Cooper, a father is on trial after his baby dies in the back seat of a hot car.On the morning of June 18, 2014, Justin Ross Harris and his wife, Leanna, were the adoring parents of a 22-month-old son, Cooper. By the end of the day, their child was dead. Harris forgot to drop off his son at day care, and instead drove to work, leaving Cooper in the back seat, where the child died in the Georgia heat.This year, 23 children have died in hot cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The documentary “Fatal Distraction” uses the tragic example of the Harris family to demonstrate this phenomenon. By following Harris’s murder trial in 2016, it shows the worst case scenario of what can happen when a child is left unattended.The director Susan Morgan Cooper (“To the Moon and Back”; “An Unlikely Weapon”) takes the title of her film from a 2009 article written by Gene Weingarten, who appears in the documentary, along with a number of experts who have studied the issue of hot car deaths. In talking head interviews that unfortunately establish the film’s rote, even indifferent visual style, specialists offer dispassionate explanations for how parents can forget their children.More powerful sequences involve statements from experts of a different kind — the agonized parents of children who died in the back seat. Cooper’s mother, Leanna, is interviewed for the movie, and her recollections of her son’s death and her ex-husband’s trial are among the movie’s most damning testimonies against the common practice of criminalizing caregivers who leave their children behind.If the film is at times unimaginative as a work of art, it succeeds as a humane resource for understanding an unthinkable scenario.Fatal DistractionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More