Sixteen years ago she had closed the villa in the French Quarter where she had written almost all of her novels to move to the California sun: she could not bear to live alone in New Orleans after the death of her husband Stan, a poet, struck down in 2002 by a tumor to the brain. Now Anne Rice has caught up with him: the author of over thirty “gothic” novels including “Interview with the Vampire” and “The Mayfair Witches” died of complications from a stroke, her son Christopher announced on his mother’s Facebook page.
Heir to Mary Shelley and a long tradition of female gothic novelists, Rice was 80 years old: “She left us almost on the exact anniversary of her father’s death. The immensity of our family’s grief cannot be stressed enough.” added Christopher, who had written two four-handed novels with his mother. Anne Rice will now return to New Orleans, where she was born and raised, to be buried in the family mausoleum among the sphinxes, obelisks and pyramids of that great “southern necropolis” that is the Metairie Cemetery.
For nearly 30 years she and New Orleans had been inspired by each other: almost all of the writer’s bestsellers were set in the humid and sexy night of the city of Mardi Gras with details inspired by life like the elaborate cemetery of “The Witches of Mayfair” ( is the Lafayette Cemetery of the Garden District), while the home of Louise and Lestat, two of its central characters, is cloned from the Gallier House, an opulent nineteenth-century mansion of the French Quarters. Interactions with fans were frequent and frequent: Rice’s Facebook page has over a million followers and her “book tours” were extravagant events that attracted dancers to costumed admirers. Behind her Anne leaves over 150 million copies sold worldwide.
He had started writing books in the 1970s, after his eldest daughter Michelle died of leukemia at just five years of age. “Interview with the Vampire”, the fruit of that mourning process, had come out with Knopf in 1976. Christopher, also a writer, was born two years later. The protagonist is the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac who tells a journalist about his life, “Interview with the Vampire” inaugurated the series of a dozen titles “Chronicles of the Vampires” starring the vampire Lestat: the last of the cycle, “Communion of Blood “, was released in 2018. Featuring the character of baby-vampire Claudia played by a very young Kirsten Dunst and inspired by little Michelle,” Interview with the Vampire “was adapted for the big screen in 1994 by Neil Jordan in the film twice nominated for Oscar with Brad Pitt (Louis), Tom Cruise and Antonio Banderas. The sequel, “Queen of the Damned,” was released in theaters in 2002, while cable channel AMC announced in early December a TV series based on another bestseller, “The Life of the Mayfair Witches.”
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Source From: Ansa
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