Anne Rice, who breathed new life into vampires, dies
NEW YORK — 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.
Rice died late Saturday due to complications from a stroke, her son, Christopher Rice, announced on her Facebook page and his Twitter page.
“As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions,” Christopher Rice, also an author, wrote. “In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage.”
Rice’s 1976 novel “Interview With the Vampire” was later adapted, with a script by Rice, into the 1994 movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It’s also set to be adapted again in an upcoming TV series set to premiere next year.
“Interview With the Vampire,” was Rice’s first novel but over the next five decades, she would write more than 30 books and sell more than 150 million copies.
