From an obit on usatoday.com headlined “Anne Rice, ‘Interview With the Vampire’ author, dies at 80”:
Anne Rice, the gothic novelist widely known for her best-selling novel “Interview With the Vampire,” died late Saturday. She died from complications of a stroke, her son Christopher Rice, himself a writer, announced on her Facebook page.
“In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage,” Christopher Rice wrote….
Anne Rice was famed for her book series “The Vampire Chronicles,” which launched with the 1976 novel “Interview With the Vampire,” later adapted into a Neil Jordan movie starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst (with a script by Rice) in 1994. The book is also planned to be adapted again in an upcoming TV series on AMC and AMC+ set to premiere in 2022.
“Interview With the Vampire,” in which reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, a mortal man who later becomes a vampire, was Rice’s first novel but she would go on to write more than 30 books and sell more than 150 million copies worldwide. Thirteen of them were part of “The Vampire Chronicles.”
When Rice’s daughter, Michele, died in 1972 at age 5 of leukemia, Rice conjured up the vampire Lestat out of her grief.
“Vampires for me started as a whim. I was thinking one day, what would it be like if you could get an interview with a vampire? I got carried away with it,” she said in 2010. “I discovered when I was writing those novels about vampires I could access feelings in a way I couldn’t in any realistic novel.”
Her influence on storytelling – and Hollywood – was evident instantly….
Born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in 1941, Anne Rice grew up in New Orleans, where many of her novels were set. Her father worked for the postal service but made sculptures and wrote fiction on the side. Her older sister, Alice Borchardt, also wrote fantasy and horror fiction….
Raised in an Irish Catholic family, Rice wrote about her fluctuating spiritual journey, including the 2008 memoir “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.”
“In the vampire books I was writing about lost souls looking for answers, so in a sense I was always on this journey back,” she said that year. “I do get people saying, ‘How can you be such a fool to believe in God?’ I sense many are young Goth kids who feel abandoned. I just say, look, you’re looking for the same things that I was, transcendence and redemption. I found what my characters were looking for.”
But two years later, she announced that she was no longer Christian, saying in 2010, “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control.”…
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Also see the New York Times obit by Neil Genzlinger headlined “Anne Rice, Who Spun Gothic Tales of Vampires, Dies at 80”
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