Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, best-selling gothic tales, including «Interview With a Vampire,» reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes, has died. She was 80.<\/b>
\nNEW YORK \u2014 Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, best-selling gothic tales, including \u201cInterview With a Vampire,\u201d reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes, has died. She was 80. Rice died late Saturday due to complications from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice announced on her Facebook page and his Twitter page. \u201cAs a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions,\u201d Christopher Rice, also an author, wrote. \u201cIn her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage.\u201d Rice\u2019s 1976 novel \u201cInterview With the Vampire\u201d was later adapted, with a script by Rice, into the 1994 movie directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. \u201cInterview With the Vampire,\u201d in which reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, was Rice\u2019s first novel but over the next five decades, she would write more than 30 books and sell more than 150 million copies worldwide. Thirteen of those were part of the \u201cVampire Chronicles\u201d begun with her 1976 debut. Long before \u201cTwilight\u201d or \u201cTrue Blood,\u201d Rice introduced sumptuous romance, female sexuality and queerness \u2014 many took \u201cInterview With the Vampire\u201d as an allegory for homosexuality \u2014 to the supernatural genre. \u201cI wrote novels about people who are shut out life for various reasons,\u201d Rice wrote in her 2008 memoir \u201cCalled Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.\u201d \u201cThis became a great theme of my novels \u2014 how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of various levels of meaning and, ultimately, out of human life itself.\u201d Born Howard Allen Frances O\u2019Brien in 1941, she was raised 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. Rice\u2019s mother died when Rice was 15. Rice married the poet Stan Rice, who died in 2002, in 1961. They lived amid the bohemian scene of Haight-Ashbury in 1960s San Francisco where Rice described herself as \u201ca square,\u201d typing away and studying writing at San Francisco State University while everyone else partied. Together they had two children: Christopher and Michelle, who died of leukemia at 5 in 1972. It was while grieving Michelle\u2019s death that Rice wrote \u201cInterview With the Vampire,\u201d turning one of her short stories into a book. Rice traced her fascination with vampires back to the 1934 film, \u201cDracula\u2019s Daughter,\u201d which she saw as a young girl. \u201cI never forgot that film,\u201d Rice told the Daily Beast in 2016. \u201cThat was always my impression of what vampires were: earthlings with heightened sensibility and a doomed appreciation of life.\u201d<\/p>\n