Anne Heche House: The Two Homes She Sold Before She Died

Anne Heche owned two Los Angeles houses that are well documented, and she had sold both of them before she died in August 2022. The first was a Hancock Park property she bought with the actor James Tupper in 2009 and sold a decade later; the second was a 1926 Tudor in Silver Lake that she co-owned with the actor Thomas Jane, sold in 2021. By the time of her death, she is not reported to have owned real estate at all, and her estate was later described in court filings as insolvent.

That sequence is the most useful thing to understand about her property record, because it is often reported the other way round, as though she died a substantial property owner.

This guide sets out both sales with their documented prices, the position her estate was left in, and what happened to the Mar Vista house destroyed in the crash that led to her death.

Anne Heche’s properties at a glance

Who was Anne Heche?

Anne Heche was an American actress whose career began on the soap opera Another World and took in films including Donnie Brasco, Six Days, Seven Nights and Wag the Dog, along with extensive television and stage work. She was also a writer and director.

She was in a relationship with the actor James Tupper for around a decade, and the Hancock Park house was bought jointly with him. She had two sons: Homer, with her former husband Coleman Laffoon, and Atlas, with Tupper. She died on 11 August 2022, aged 53, days after a car crash in Los Angeles.

The Hancock Park house she built

In autumn 2009, Heche and Tupper paid $1.85 million for a property on a tree-lined street in the Hancock Park area. They did not keep the house that stood on it: they demolished it and built a new one the same year, designed as a private family home rather than a showpiece.

The replacement runs around 4,700 square feet, with five bedrooms and five bathrooms. Its defining space is an open-plan family room and kitchen under a two-storey ceiling, with a fireplace and French doors.

From 2017, they let it out rather than living in it, at a monthly rent reported between $14,500 and $18,000. It went on the market in May 2019 at $3.95 million, was cut to $3.695 million the following month, and sold that November for $3.165 million. Against the $1.85 million purchase a decade earlier, that is a solid gain on paper, though the cost of demolishing and rebuilding the house has never been published, so the actual return cannot be calculated from the two prices alone.

The Silver Lake Tudor

Her other documented property was a storybook Tudor in Silver Lake, built in 1926 and a little under 2,100 square feet. It was not a house she chose and bought on her own. It belonged to Thomas Jane, the actor she had worked with on Hung and her partner at the time, and in 2020 he transferred it into their joint names.

They listed it at $1.999 million, and in July 2021 it closed at $2.025 million after roughly a month on the market, slightly above the asking price. What matters for the wider picture is the timing: this sale completed about a year before she died, which means that from mid-2021 onwards there is no documented property in her name.

The crash, and the house that was destroyed

On 5 August 2022, Heche’s car left the road and struck a home in the Mar Vista area of Los Angeles, some coverage of which described the location as Venice. Minutes earlier, she had struck the garage of an apartment building, and she hit a parked car shortly before reaching the house. The fire that followed took 59 firefighters about 65 minutes to put out, and crews could not reach her car for more than 20 minutes; she was trapped for about 45 minutes in all. The woman renting the house, Lynne Mishele, was not injured but lost her belongings.

No official finding explains why she lost control. The Los Angeles Police Department opened a felony DUI investigation and closed it when she died. The county coroner later found no evidence that she was impaired by illicit substances at the time of the crash: the cocaine metabolite in her blood pointed to earlier use, the fentanyl detected had been given in hospital, and there was no alcohol in her system. The early reports that she had been driving under the influence came before those findings.

She was taken to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and then to the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital. She was declared brain dead on 11 August, her legal date of death, and kept on life support until 14 August so that her organs could be donated. The coroner ruled her death an accident, caused by inhalation and thermal injuries, with a fractured sternum as a contributing factor.

The property consequences were substantial and are documented in probate filings. Mishele rented the house; its owners were private landlords with no connection to Heche. Both the owners and Mishele filed claims of $2 million against her estate. By April 2024, seven creditors had filed claims, three of them for at least $2 million each, and the total was reported at around $6 million.

The house itself was later dealt with by its owners, who sold it in 2023 for $775,000. It was subsequently restored and returned to the market in February 2024 at $1.499 million, went through two price cuts, and went under contract at $1.35 million.

The estate, and why there was no property in it

Heche died without a will that was accepted as valid, and administration of her estate was contested: her elder son, Homer Laffoon, was appointed administrator, and James Tupper unsuccessfully petitioned the court on the matter.

The financial position that emerged was stark. Reporting on the probate filings put her assets at around $110,000, made up of a modest bank account, residuals, and interests in her companies, against creditor claims of roughly $6 million, which made the estate insolvent. An estate sale of her personal belongings was held to raise funds, and Laffoon worked toward negotiated settlements of the claims rather than litigation.

That has not been straightforward. In November 2025, Laffoon told the court that a tentative settlement had been reached with Mishele; in June 2026, she filed a denial, saying she would not agree to anything without a complete accounting of the estate. Nearly four years after Heche’s death, the estate remained open.

This is the point at which the property record becomes directly relevant. Both of her documented homes had been sold, in 2019 and 2021, well before the events of August 2022. There was no house in the estate to sell against the claims. Had either property still been held, the outcome for the claimants and for her family would have been materially different.

What happened to her homes

Because Heche died in 2022, the question of where she lives does not apply. What can be said about her homes is that both passed to unrelated private buyers during her lifetime, in ordinary market transactions, and neither has any continuing connection to her.

The Hancock Park house has changed hands since 2019 and has been listed again at higher prices by subsequent owners, which is normal for a well-built house in that part of Los Angeles and reflects the market rather than her association with it. The Silver Lake Tudor has not been the subject of further reporting.

Her situation is an unusually clear illustration of something that recurs across celebrity property: what a person owned at the peak of their earnings and what they owned at the end can be entirely different. The same gap appears in the coverage of Brittany Murphy’s house, and in a different direction in the estate of Joan Rivers, whose Manhattan apartment was the largest asset her family had to deal with.

Sources

• Yahoo and Home Stratosphere on the Hancock Park purchase, its 2019 asking price and sale.
• American Luxury on the 2021 Silver Lake sale at $2.03 million; the joint ownership with Thomas Jane and the listing price are from the brokers’ deal record on Traded.
• NBC Los Angeles and Los Angeles Magazine on the crash, the fire response, and her hospital care.
• ABC7 and NPR on the coroner’s findings.
• FOX 11 Los Angeles and NBC News on the creditor claims against her estate, its assets, and its insolvency.
• E! News on the administration of the estate and the sale of her assets.
• TMZ on the disputed settlement with Lynne Mishele in 2025 and 2026.
• TMZ and Yahoo on the destroyed home’s 2023 sale, restoration, and relisting.