The gothic novelist who gave vampires new life
1941–2021
Anne Rice knew how to make an entrance. Having won a large and devoted readership with her Vampire Chronicles series—which began with 1976’s Interview With the Vampire—Rice would delight fans by turning up at bookstore readings in her hometown of New Orleans in a horse-drawn hearse, rising from a glass coffin to sign books with a pen dripping blood-red ink. Interview and its 13 follow-ups sold upward of 80 million copies worldwide and inspired a slew of sexy vampire fiction, including the hit Twilight series. But Rice saw her tales of Lestat de Lioncourt, a roguish bisexual 18th-century nobleman turned vampire, and his angst-ridden companion, Louis de Pointe du Lac, as more than genre works. They were literary explorations of the human condition. “All of us make ruthless compromises in order to live,” said Rice, who saw something of the vampire in herself. “I want to be loved and never forgotten. I’m really greedy, you know? I want to be immortal.”
Anne Rice
She was born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in New Orleans, named after her mailman father, because her mother thought a man’s name “would help a girl get ahead,” said The Hollywood Reporter. But when a teacher asked Howard to introduce herself on the first day of school, she replied that she was Anne. “The name stuck.” Her mother died of alcoholism when Anne was 14, and tragedy struck again in 1972 when her 5-year-old daughter, Michele, died of leukemia. “The loss left her bereft and directionless” until she tried “writing to shake off the melancholy,” said The New York Times.“Interview, which includes a young girl who resembles Michele, was the result.” Critics initially dismissed the book, but the reading public latched on, and in 1994 Interview was made into a hit film starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.
Raised as “a devout Catholic,” Rice swerved publicly between faith and doubt, said The
Daily Telegraph (U.K.). As a young woman she embraced the militant atheism of her husband, poet and painter Stan Rice, but in 1998 “shocked her fans” by re-embracing Catholicism. She wrote two novels about Jesus, and then, in 2010, Rice announced that she could no longer be part of a religion that conflicted with so many of her personal beliefs—including her support of the LGBTQ community. But she never shook the influence of the church. The vampire “books were very much about groping in the darkness,” she said in 2012, “but they were also steeped in Catholic guilt.”