Entertainment
Bestselling Novelist Anne Rice Dies from Stroke at 80
Anne Rice, known for her many Gothic novels including “Interview with a Vampire,” has died. She was 80. Ann Rice died from complications of a stroke Saturday evening her family posted on Facebook.
A hit movie was made out of her novel “Interview with the Vampire,” starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt 18 years after it was written.
After struggling to get it published, “Interview With a Vampire” became a massive hit, particularly in paperback. In the years that followed, she published two historical novels and three erotica under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. In 1985, however, she published “The Vampire Lestat,” about the “Interview With a Vampire” character she would return to up until “Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat” in 2018.
Victoria Wilson, Anne Rice’s longtime editor, recalled her as “a fierce storyteller who lived quietly and imagined large worlds.”
Wilson said in a statement that she evoked the feelings of an era before we knew what it was. “She was decades ahead of her time as a writer.”
Anne Rice’s family said she will be interred in a mausoleum in New Orleans during a private ceremony. A public memorial will also take place in New Orleans next year. Rice’s novel “Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris,” written with her son Christopher, will be published in February.
As a writer, my mother taught me to ignore genre boundaries and live a life devoted to my obsessions,” Christopher wrote. Above all, “in her final hours, I stood beside her hospital bed marvelling at her accomplishments and her bravery, awash in memories of a life that took us from fog-laced hills in the San Francisco Bay Area to New Orleans’ magical streets and the twinkling vistas of Southern California.”
