Anne Heche

A lithe blonde whose acting career was long overshadowed by her tabloid-ready personal life, Heche was just 18 when she embarked on a four-year stint on the soap Another World. During her tenure, she snagged a Daytime Emmy and her significantly older costar Richard Burgi as her boyfriend. In 1991, Heche left the show and turned in fine supporting performances in a string of TV-movies and indie features, notably as a neurotic bride in Walking and Talking and a hooker with an eye for the ladies in the underrated 1996 thriller Wild Side. Her role in the latter turned out to be prophetic, because the next year, the budding starlet suddenly found herself in the spotlight when she and her lesbian lover, Ellen DeGeneres, went public as a couple. Although Hollywood homophobia probably had a part in stifling her career, her poor choices didn't help, either. Except for the 1997 political satire Wag the Dog, which showed off her comedic side, her subsequent projects were duds (the ridiculous remake of Psycho, the tepid romantic comedy Six Days, Seven Nights), and a nasty break up with DeGeneres in 2000 which prompted a public freak-out (she was found wandering around ranting about aliens), didn't improve her image. In 2001, the addled Heche tried to get her life in order. She married cameraman Coleman Lafferty (ironically, the couple met when he was working on a documentary about DeGeneres), published the autobiography Call Me Crazy (which chronicled her allegedly abusive childhood), and returned to the small screen with a recurring romantic role on Ally McBeal. TV and theater allowed Heche to make a true comeback, and in 2004 she was nominated for a Tony and an Emmy, for her sparkling performance in a revival of On the Twentieth Century and for her harrowing turn as an abusive mom in the TV-movie Gracie's Choice. After a few more recurring series roles, Heche landed her own quirky show, Men in Trees, in 2006, about a romantically challenged relationship coach stuck in self-imposed exile in Alaska. The show not only revved up her career, it allegedly perked up her love life, too: Midway through the first season, she separated from her husband amidst rumors she was having an affair with her small-screen flame, James Tupper.