Dies At 80, Anne Rice, Who Breathed New Life Into Vampires
NEW YORK (AP) — Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, best-promoting gothic tales, inclusive of “Interview With a Vampire,” reinvented the blood-consuming immortals as tragic antiheroes, has died. She changed into 80.
Rice died overdue Saturday because of headaches from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice was introduced on her Facebook web page and his Twitter web page.
“As a writer, she taught me to defy style limitations and give up to my obsessive passions,” Christopher Rice, additionally an author, wrote. “In her very last hours, I sat beside her clinic mattress in awe of her accomplishments and her courage.”
Rice's 1976 novel “Interview With the Vampire" changed into later tailored, with a script with the aid of using Rice, into the 1994 film directed with the aid of using Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It's additionally set to be tailored once more in an upcoming TV collection on AMC and AMC+ set to a greatest subsequent year.
“Interview With the Vampire,” wherein reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac changed into Rice's first novel however over the following 5 decades, she could write greater than 30 books and promote greater than a hundred and fifty million copies worldwide. Thirteen of these had been a part of the “Vampire Chronicles" began together along with her 1976 debut. Long earlier than “Twilight” or “True Blood,” Rice brought luxurious romance, lady sexuality, and queerness — many took “Interview With the Vampire” as an allegory for homosexuality — to the supernatural style.
“I wrote novels approximately those who are closeout lifestyles for numerous reasons," Rice wrote in her 2008 memoir “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.” “This has become a first-rate subject of my novels — how one suffers as an outcast, how one is close out of numerous stages of that means and, ultimately, out of human lifestyles itself."
Born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in 1941, she changed into raised in New Orleans, wherein lots of her novels had been set. Her father labored for the postal provider however made sculptures and wrote fiction at the side. Her older sister, Alice Borchardt, additionally wrote fable and horror fiction. Rice's mom died while Rice changed into 15.
Raised in an Irish Catholic family, Rice, first of all, imagined herself turning into a priest (earlier than she found out girls were not allowed) or a nun. Rice frequently wrote approximately her fluctuating religious journey. In 2010, she introduced that she changed into now not Christian, saying “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-synthetic start control.”
“I believed for a long term that the differences, the quarrels amongst Christians didn’t rely on lots for the individual, which you stay your lifestyles and live out of it. But then I started to realize that it wasn’t a smooth issue to do,” Rice instructed The Associated Press then. “I got here to the realization that if I didn’t make this declaration, I changed into going to lose my thoughts.”
Rice married the poet Stan Rice, who died in 2002, in 1961. They lived amid the bohemian scene of Haight-Ashbury in Sixties San Francisco wherein Rice defined herself as “a square,” typing away and reading writing at San Francisco State University even as all people else partied. Together with that, they'd children: Christopher and Michelle, who died of leukemia at five in 1972.
It changed into even as grieving Michelle's dying that Rice wrote “Interview With the Vampire," turning certainly considered one among her quick tales right into a book. Rice traced her fascination with vampires again to the 1934 film, “Dracula's Daughter,” which she noticed as a younger girl.
“I by no means forgot that film,” Rice instructed the Daily Beast in 2016. “That changed into continually my impact of what vampires had been: earthlings with heightened sensibility and a doomed appreciation of lifestyles.”
Though Rice had first of all struggled to get it published, “Interview With a Vampire” changed into a huge hit, specifically in paperback. She failed to without delay amplifies the story, following it up with a couple of ancient novels and 3 erotic novels penned below the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. But in 1985, she published “The Vampire Lestat,” approximately the “Interview With a Vampire” man or woman she could constantly go back to, as much as 2018's “Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat.”
In Rice's “Vampire Chronicles,” a few critics noticed the most effective reasonably-priced eroticism. But others — inclusive of tens of thousands and thousands of readers — noticed the maximum consequential interpretation of vampires because of Bram Stoker.
“Let me recommend one motive why the books discovered a mass audience. They had been written with the aid of using a person whose auditory and visible studies fashioned the prose," Rice wrote in her memoir. "I am a horrible reader. But my thoughts are full of those auditory and visible classes and, powered with the aid of using them, I can write approximately 5 instances quicker than I can read.”
Rice's longtime editor, Victoria Wilson, recalled her as “a fierce storyteller who wrote largely, lived quietly, and imagined worlds on a grand scale."
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