Anne Rice, well renowned for her Gothic novels, died on Sunday at the age of 80, according to her family.
Rice died Saturday evening as a result of complications from a stroke.
The top-selling novelist is most known for her novel "Interview With the Vampire," which was adapted into a successful film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt 18 years after it was published.
Rice created a number of Gothic horror books, the most well-known of which is The Vampire Chronicles, which includes "Interview With the Vampire," "Queen of the Damned," and "The Vampire Lestat."
Rice will be laid to rest at the family mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, according to her son Christopher.
"Our family's pain is immense, and it cannot be exaggerated. She taught me to embrace my aspirations, reject conformity, and combat the dark whispers of fear and self-doubt as my mother's unfailing support. She taught me how to ignore genre limitations and succumb to my compulsive desires as a writer "Christopher penned an essay. "With her last hours, I sat beside her hospital bed, immersed in recollections of a life that took us from the fog-shrouded hills of the San Francisco Bay Area to the enchanting streets of New Orleans to the dazzling panoramas of Southern California."
Rice's life will be commemorated in New Orleans next year with an open-to-the-public memorial service.
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Anne Rice in New York in 2016. "It's important to me that people understand that my novels are serious, that they're supposed to make a difference, and that they're meant to be literary," she once stated. |
Anne Rice, the Gothic author best known for "Interview With the Vampire," a 1976 novel that was adapted into a successful picture starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in 1994, died on Saturday at a hospital in Rancho Mirage, California. She was 80 years old.
The cause, according to her son Christopher Rice, was complications from a stroke.
Ms. Rice was a relatively unknown author when she adapted a short tale she'd written in the late 1960s into her first published novel, "Interview With the Vampire." It follows a lone vampire named Louis as he tells his life story to a reporter, but Ms. Rice claims the narrative is also hers.
In 1988, she told The New York Times, "I really got into the persona." "I was able to explain my reality for the first time, the dark, gothic effect on my boyhood." For me, it's not a fantasy. For me, my childhood came to life."
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"Interview With the Vampire," based on Ms. Rice's 1976 novel, was adapted into a famous film starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. |
Many reviews dismissed the work, as though they didn't understand its tone or attraction.
Rice is described as a 'dazzling storyteller,' according to The New York Times' Leo Braudy. "However, there is no plot here, just a succession of occasionally brilliant but mainly static tableaus from Roger Corman films, and some self-conscious soliloquizing from Spiderman comics, all wrapped in a ballooning, pretentious vocabulary."
The public, on the other hand, took to it; "Interview With the Vampire" became a big seller, and Ms. Rice found herself with a sizable following, which she continued to delight with a series of sequels known as the Vampire Chronicles. The books, which totaled more than a dozen, are largely credited with rekindling interest in all things vampire, which has subsequently been mirrored on big and small screens, as well as onstage.
Ms. Rice, on the other hand, was not a one-subject author. She published dozens of books in all. She authored stand-alone books about two castrati, such as "Cry to Heaven" (1982). She published erotic books under the name Anne Rampling, notably "Exit to Eden" (1985), which included sex slaves. She also created an erotic series known as the "Sleeping Beauty" novels as A.N. Roquelaure.
Ms. Rice's admirers are devoted to her work and eager to immerse themselves in the worlds she has created.
"I'm the most boring person there when I go to my signings," she told ABC News' "Day One" in 1993. Everyone else is dripping in velvet and lace, and they're giving me dead flowers wrapped in leather handcuffs, which I like."
Her writings appealed to a wide range of readers, including gothic romance aficionados, spiritual seekers, some homosexual and transgender readers who related with the themes of isolation and alienation, and others. Her writing may have been dismissed by critics, but she aspired to greater heights.
"It's important to me that people understand that my novels are serious, that they're supposed to make a difference, and that they're meant to be literary," she told The New York Times in 1990. "I don't care whether that's foolish or pretentious-sounding. They're supposed to be in those Berkeley campus bags alongside Castaneda, Tolstoy, and anyone else. I get insane when I'm dismissed as a 'pop' writer."
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Howard Allen O'Brien was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 4, 1941, to Howard and Katherine O'Brien. (She had been given the name "Anne" by the time she was in first grade, despite the fact that she was named after her father.) Her father was a postal worker, and her mother was a stay-at-home mom.
She grew up in New Orleans, where she wrote plays for her three sisters to perform and imagined ghostly creatures in the windows of the houses she walked by. Films such as "Dracula's Daughter" (1936) left an indelible influence.
Her Roman Catholic upbringing and education, which were rich in imagery that appealed to her already strong imagination, did the same.
"It was just typical fare at Catholic school to sit and listen to the marvels that happened to this saint or that saint, or how someone flew up in the air during prayer," she added.
Her mother died when she was 15; she said the cause was alcoholism, which Ms. Rice would later suffer with, although claiming in a 2008 video that she had been clean for 28 years.
She had grown disillusioned with the Catholic faith by her late teens.
In 1988, she told The New York Times, "I feel a tremendous lot of indignation towards a religion that would educate youngsters that a 7-year-old may burn in hell for French kissing, right alongside a Nazi sadist." After decades of unbelief, she came to believe in God in the late 1990s, and over the next few years, she authored two novels inspired by Jesus' life, as well as a memoir, "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Journey" (2008).
Her father remarried and moved the family to Texas, where Ms. Rice met Stan Rice, a fellow student, in high school.
She briefly attended Texas Woman's University before dropping out and attempting to live in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Mr. Rice had seen her in high school and sought her out; they began an extensive relationship, and he finally proposed to her via letter.
They married in 1961 and lived in San Francisco, where Mr. Rice became a poet and teacher until passing away in 2002. "I was a lousy reader," she said in her book, "and, in fact, couldn't major in English because I couldn't read the volumes of Chaucer or Shakespeare prescribed in the classes." Ms. Rice graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in political science, not literature. (She would go on to receive a master's degree in creative writing there later.)
Michelle, the couple's 5-year-old daughter, died of leukemia in 1972, marking a watershed moment in their lives. Ms. Rice said the loss left her feeling devastated and directionless for a while until she tried to shake off the sadness by returning to writing.
"I wanted to write and write and write, pour out my feelings, develop stories, and create something," she told ABC in 1993. "That was my reaction to having something die and pass out of my hands like that, and seeing this lovely child die, regardless of what I or anybody else did."
The outcome was "Interview With the Vampire," which features a young girl who looks like Michelle.
She continued the Vampire Chronicles series with "The Vampire Lestat" (1985), "The Queen of the Damned" (1988), and additional books. "Blood Communion," the most recent, was released in 2018.
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Ms. Rice and Elton John during the 2006 Broadway opening of "Lestat," a musical based on Ms. Rice's Vampire Chronicles. The soundtrack was composed by Mr. John. |
She is survived by her sisters Karen O'Brien, Micki Jenkins, and Tamara Tinker, as well as her son, a writer with whom she occasionally worked on novels.
Ms. Rice, who resided in Rancho Mirage at the time, said in a 1993 interview with ABC that part of her interest in vampires as a literary device was that they might be interpreted as a metaphor for the human condition. "Don't you believe all of us make brutal concessions in order to exist," she explained.
She could have had a vampiric side.
She stated, "I want to be cherished and never forgotten." "You know how greedy I am?" "I want to live forever."