Actors of a Certain Age

Celebratinging Anne Heche (R.I.P.) and Winona Ryder

On Friday nights when I raising my three younger kids it was movie night. We’d go to a nearby Blockbuster, rent some movies — usually one for the boys and another for my daughter and me.

The boys liked action movies, horror movies and the like.

My daughter and I usually chose romcoms.

One of the rare films we all liked was the 1998 Ivan Reitman classic, “Six Days, Seven Nights.” It starred Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in a charming adventure in the South Pacific.

So it was with great sadness, and a personal touch, that we learned of her death Friday.

The thing about actors is they lay so much of themselves on the line in their best performances that as a viewer you fee like you know them afterward. Of course, they are only playing a part, as Heche did in that movie, but when you fall in love with the character you fall in love with the actor too.

So, although in most cases you never meet the actor in real life, you count them among your friends.

R.I.P. Anne Heche.

***

Another actor of the same generation whose work I have long admired is Winona Ryder. I have at least three personal favorites among her lesser-known roles. When she was young, she played a troubled teenager character in “Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael” with Jeff Daniels, and “Mermaids” with Cher.

More recently, a movie of hers I am partial to is “Destination Wedding” with Keanu Reeves.

In Ryder’s case, although I’ve never met her, we do have one mutual connection. I knew her Dad, Michael Horowitz, in the 70s, when she was a toddler. Michael was Timothy Leary’s archivist at the time I wrote my first big feature for Rolling Stone, “Tim Leary’s Dark Pact With the Feds” in 1974, and was one of my sources for that story.

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