A sharp eyed fan pointed this out to me.

This could only otherwise have happened on an actual soap opera.

There’s a tragic link between Anne Heche, who had a terrible, drunken car accident this past weekend, and another actress.

Heche played the role of Marley and Vicky Love (twins) on the NBC soap, “Another World,” in the late 1980s. She won a Daytime Emmy award and left for greener pastures.

Her successor was actress Jensen Buchanan, who took over the roles in 1991 and played them until the 35 year old soap ended in 1999.

Heche now is in ICU in a Los Angeles hospital after plowing her car into a Los Angeles home on Friday. Her car, a Mini Cooper, is burnt to a crisp. According to reports, the home was destroyed. Friends and neighbors of the owner have started a GoFundMe campaign for the now homeless woman. There are pictures of a possible vodka bottle in Heche’s car taken right before the accident.

Strangely enough, Buchanan has a similar, slightly more awful but parallel story. In 2016, she was arrested for a DUI that resulted in the near death of the person she hit. (He was severely injured, according to reports.) Buchanan had a blood alcohol content level of 0.34 when she reportedly veered onto the wrong side of Highway 154 and into the path of an Arizona driver, nearly killing him. 

The former soap star, who’d been married for 10 years to top Hollywood talent agency owner Sam Gores, was sentenced to one year in County Jail and five years probation. And here’s the kicker: she was released from jail subsequently, having served about a month and a half of custody time. But in 2018 she was remanded back to prison for allegedly violating the probation. She was cleared, however, after a hearing.

Heche, of course, won’t be charged with anything until she’s back to health and what actually happened has been determined. Her accident was just that, an accident. But the connection between the two actresses is stranger than fiction.

In “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the great 2019 movie by Quentin Tarantino, Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate visits a bookstore to buy Roman Polanski a copy of “Tess of the Durbevilles.” The white haired clerk, an older man, looked familiar. The shock was he was played by Clu Gulager, then 90, who represented in many ways the characters played Leonardo Di Caprio and Brad Pitt in the movie. Gulager, matinee idol handsome, had been a regular on TV westerns in the late 1950s and well into the 60s. But mostly people had forgotten about him, and probably assumed, as I did, that he’d died long ago.

Gulager passed away Saturday at age 93. He spent his young years with roles on TV westerns until he became a regular on “The Tall Man.” He went into “Wagon Train” playing different parts and then filmed 104 episodes, five seasons of the hit show, “The Virginians.” That role set him up for the next three decades.

There is almost not a hit broadcast show in the 70s or 80s that Gulager didn’t guest star on. He never got a series again, but like the Pitt and DiCaprio characters, he was always in demand and warmly welcomed. His one big artistic moment was in 1969 when a short film he directed, “A Day with the Boys,” was nominated for Best Short Film at Cannes.

In the foggy mists of Hollywood lore, Gulager turned down a role in Robert Altman’s “MASH.” He also filmed the pilot for the nighttime soap, “Falcon Crest,” but wasn’t hired for the series. Still, his credits rolled and rolled. Toward the end of his career, Gulager was cast in a number of low budget horror films, which could not have been fun. He was one of TV’s original cowboys.

Condolences to his two sons, his fans, and friends.