BROADWAY Anne Heche moves on with life as play's star

The actress says she's found stability as a wife and mother.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
NEW YORK -- The last thing Anne Heche ever thought she'd see in her mirror was a slinky '30s movie star. A silky creature like Carole Lombard.
Yet the actress formerly known as Ellen DeGeneres' girlfriend has taped the platinum-blonde's photograph above the makeup table in her dressing room to juice her performance as a Hollywood diva opposite Alec Baldwin in the Broadway revival of the 1934 Lombard classic "Twentieth Century."
"I'm at least 1,000 percent more glamorous than in anything else I've done," she says.
Heche has been busily promoting her Broadway turn on the talk-show circuit. But she will skip Ellen's popular TV show.
"No, I wouldn't go on ['The Ellen DeGeneres Show']," she says. "I don't see how either of us would benefit."
The new Anne Heche doesn't want to be confronted with the old Anne Heche. So she meets questions about the old Heche with a blank stare.
The old Heche was the pixie-cut string bean DeGeneres introduced as her lesbian live-in when the comedian came out on the Oprah Winfrey show.
She was the Ecstasy-fueled basket case found wandering around Fresno waiting for aliens to beam her up after the duo broke up.
The old Heche wrote in her 2001 memoir, "Call Me Crazy," about childhood abuse by her father, a Baptist choir master who led a gay double life.
A new direction
Now, she announces, she feels destiny leading her in a different direction.
At 34, "I want to show that I can be a leading lady," she says.
"It's taken me a long time to make clear for myself what I'm best at. It's acting -- and I think I can be great."
It's a role she began in 2002, when she took over from Jennifer Jason Leigh in "Proof" on Broadway.
It helped that she had found the "stability, love and laughter" in her 2001 marriage to Coleman (Coley) Laffoon, the cameraman she met during production on a DeGeneres documentary.
They have a son, Homer. Her in-laws are California society. The marriage distanced her further from the background she likes to describe as "white trash."
Frostily, she credits her parents -- who, she says, hid family dysfunction behind a fa & ccedil;ade of religious piety -- as her greatest acting teachers.
"Everything was pretend, pretend, pretend," she says. Her father died of AIDS in 1983. She's estranged from her mother, still a devout Christian.
Then what plans do you have for Homer's religious upbringing?
Blank stare.
Are you still spiritual?
"What is spiritual?" Blank stare.
Celestia -- the half-sibling of Jesus whom Heche imagined herself to be as she beckoned to outer space -- was spiritual.
Blank stare.
Statement on religion
Nonetheless, Heche's memories are vital enough to heighten the glee she takes in a subplot of "Twentieth Century" that lampoons religious fanaticism and creaky medieval passion plays. Its unplanned relevance to the current controversy around Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" delights her even more.
"One of the beauties of this play is its sense of humor about religion, which to me is something childish," she says.
"It expresses itself in a fanatical way, based, in my opinion, in fantasy."
In contrast, beneath the bluster and egomania of co-star Baldwin's Oscar Jaffe and her own Lily Garland lies a truer reality.
"There's a heart connection," Heche says. "It's the importance of love lost, and re-found."
That can happen, in a play.