Anne Rice sometimes used an unusual mode of transport around her native New Orleans: a 6ft coffin driven in a blacked-out hearse and flanked by her “personal undertakers”. The spectacle drew legions of pallid fans, who followed her around the Big Easy in search of her “blood-soaked” signature inside a copy of Interview with the Vampire (1976), her debut novel.
“I write instinctively and spontaneously about what hooks me, and that’s frequently death, guilt and vampires,” she told The Sunday Times. “The supernatural is fascinating to me.”
Rice had always wanted to be a writer, but nothing seemed to work out until after the death of her daughter, Michele, nicknamed “Mouse”, from leukaemia in 1972, shortly before her sixth birthday. “I went back to a story that I had written ten years before, about a child vampire,” she said. “I didn’t really think at the time that it was based on my daughter . . . But her death obviously had a subconscious influence.” Later she suggested that the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, who raises Claudia with another vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac, was based on her husband.
Initially Interview with the Vampire received a mixed reception. However, a dozen sequels and prequels known as The Vampire Chronicles helped to turn it into a bestseller, as did an Oscar-nominated 1994 film adaptation of the same name starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and a young Kirsten Dunst, for which Rice wrote the screenplay.
In all she wrote more than 30 books, including The Sleeping Beauty Quartet under the pen name AN Roquelaure. It relates the sexual adventures of a female protagonist known as Beauty who is awoken by the prince from her 100-year sleep not with a kiss but through sex.
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That series came to a brief standstill after the third instalment when, in 1998, Rice reverted to the Roman Catholicism of her youth, a change in world view so profound that she marked it by publishing Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005), a first-person novel from the perspective of a young Jesus Christ who discovers his powers at the age of seven by killing a playground rival then bringing him back to life. A sequel followed, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (2008), as did non-Christ books such as Angel Time (2009), about a CIA assassin who changes his ways.
Together Rice’s books sold an estimated 135 million copies, making her among the most popular fantasy writers of all time, and several were turned into films or television series. She is credited with paving the way for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels. However, she never forgot how it all started in the dark days after her daughter’s death. “I was just a drunk, hysterical person with no job, no identity, no nothing,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “There was a two-year period after her death when I just drank a lot and wrote a lot, like crazy.”
She was born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in New Orleans in 1941, the second of four daughters of Howard O’Brien, who served in the US navy and worked in the US postal service, and Kay, his wife. She was named after her father because her mother thought a male name would help her to get ahead, but when asked to introduce herself on her first day at school she replied “Anne”, later changing it legally. Her alcoholic mother died when Anne was 14 and in 1958 the family moved to Texas. She dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco, working as an insurance claims adjuster.
In 1961 she married Stan Rice, an artist who had been her childhood sweetheart and proposed by letter. They settled in her home city. After their daughter’s death they had a son, the novelist Christopher Rice, who survives her. Like her mother, Rice drank to excess. “It was only when my son was born that I finally stopped,” she said.
Her husband died in 2002 and months before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005 she felt the urge to put his paintings in storage and leave the city to be closer to Christopher in California. “The timing, it was really bizarre,” she said. “Of course, it may have been sheer coincidence. And if it was God’s work, what does it say about the people who were drowned?”
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A Times reporter in 2009 found that in every room of her desert compound in Rancho Mirage, California, there were hundreds of lifesized dolls, mostly girls and mostly about the same age, some of which had cost as much as $50,000. She claimed to go out only rarely, other than to eat; the occasional exception was boxing matches.
She no longer turned up to readings in a coffin and she stopped signing with “blood”. Although she had again distanced herself from organised religion in the past decade, she insisted that her books would not upset the church. “They’re total pornography, yes, but safe — a playful fantasy, both gay and straight,” she said, adding quickly: “I wasn’t into the lifestyle myself. I’ve always lived a fairly conservative life. I’ve never been particularly wild or crazy.”
Anne Rice, novelist, was born on October 4, 1941. She died from complications of a stroke on December 11, 2021, aged 80