Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, best-selling gothic tales, together with “Interview With the Vampire,” reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes, has died. She was 80.
Rice died late Saturday resulting from issues from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice introduced on her Fb web page and his Twitter web page.
“As a author, she taught me to defy style boundaries and give up to my obsessive passions,” Christopher Rice, additionally an creator, wrote. “In her last hours, I sat beside her hospital mattress in awe of her accomplishments and her braveness.”
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Rice’s 1976 novel “Interview With the Vampire” was later tailored, with a script by Rice, into the 1994 film directed by 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 premiere subsequent yr.
“Interview With the Vampire,” through which reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, was Rice’s first novel however over the following 5 many years, she would write greater than 30 books and promote greater than 150 million copies worldwide. 13 of these have been a part of the “Vampire Chronicles” begun along with her 1976 debut. Lengthy earlier than “Twilight” or “True Blood,” Rice launched luxurious romance, feminine sexuality and queerness — many took “Interview With the Vampire” as an allegory for homosexuality — to the supernatural style.
“I wrote novels about people who find themselves shut out life for varied causes,” Rice wrote in her 2008 memoir “Referred to as Out of Darkness: A Religious Confession.” “This turned an amazing theme of my novels, how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of assorted ranges of that means and, finally, out of human life itself.”
Born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in 1941, she was raised in New Orleans, the place a lot of her novels have been set. Her father labored for the postal service however made sculptures and wrote fiction on the aspect. Her older sister, Alice Borchardt, additionally wrote fantasy and horror fiction. Rice’s mom died when Rice was 15.
Raised in an Irish Catholic household, Rice initially imagined herself changing into a priest (earlier than she realized ladies weren’t allowed) or a nun. Rice usually wrote about her fluctuating non secular journey. In 2010, she introduced that she was not Christian, saying “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial contraception.”
“I believed for a very long time that the variations, the quarrels amongst Christians didn’t matter lots for the person, that you simply reside your life and keep out of it. However then I started to understand that it wasn’t a simple factor to do,” Rice advised The Related Press then. “I got here to the conclusion that if I didn’t make this declaration, I used to be 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 the place Rice described herself as “a sq.,” typing away and learning writing at San Francisco State College whereas everybody else partied. Collectively that they had two kids: Christopher and Michelle, who died of leukemia at 5 in 1972.
It was whereas grieving Michelle’s loss of life that Rice wrote “Interview With the Vampire,” turning one in all her brief tales right into a ebook. Rice traced her fascination with vampires again to the 1934 movie, “Dracula’s Daughter,” which she noticed as a younger lady.
“I by no means forgot that movie,” Rice advised the Day by day Beast in 2016. “That was all the time my impression of what vampires have been: earthlings with heightened sensibility and a doomed appreciation of life.”
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Although Rice had initially struggled to get it printed, “Interview With a Vampire” was an enormous hit, notably in paperback. She didn’t instantly prolong the story, following it up with a pair of historic novels and three erotic novels penned underneath the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. However in 1985, she printed “The Vampire Lestat,” in regards to the “Interview With a Vampire” character she would constantly return to, as much as 2018’s “Blood Communion: A Story of Prince Lestat.”
In Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles,” some critics noticed solely low cost eroticism. However others, together with tens of millions of readers, noticed essentially the most consequential interpretation of vampires since Bram Stoker.
“Let me recommend one motive why the books discovered a mass viewers. They have been written by somebody whose auditory and visible experiences formed the prose,” Rice wrote in her memoir. “I’m a horrible reader. However my thoughts is stuffed with these auditory and visible classes and, powered by them, I can write about 5 occasions quicker than I can learn.”
Rice’s longtime editor, Victoria Wilson, recalled her as “a fierce storyteller who wrote massive, lived quietly, and imagined worlds on a grand scale.”
“She summoned the emotions of an age lengthy earlier than we knew what they have been,” Wilson mentioned in a press release. “As a author, she was many years forward of her time.”
Rice can be interred throughout a personal ceremony at a household mausoleum in New Orleans, her household mentioned. A public celebration may also be deliberate for subsequent yr in New Orleans. “Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris,” a novel Rice wrote along with her son Christopher, can be printed in February.
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