Personal Life
After a six-month marriage to actress Eleanor Shaw (née Eleanor Scherr, died 2004), he married RKO contract player Frances Neal. They had two daughters, actresses Vana O'Brien and Cathleen (Kate) Heflin, and a son, Tracy. Heflin was the grandfather of actor Ben O'Brien and actress Eleanor O'Brien. Heflin was the uncle of Marta Heflin and Mady Kaplan, both actresses, and director Jonathan Kaplan.
During World War II, Heflin served as a combat cameraman in the Ninth Air Force in Europe.
On July 6, 1971, Heflin had a heart attack while swimming in his pool. He reached the ladder where he managed to hang on unconscious for hours until he was found. He then lay unconscious for days, apparently never regaining consciousness. Van Heflin died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on July 23, 1971, aged 60. He had left instructions forbidding a public funeral. Instead, his cremated remains were scattered in the ocean.
Read more about this topic: Van Heflin
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“No Vice or Wickedness, which People fall into from Indulgence to Desires which are natural to all, ought to place them below the Compassion of the virtuous Part of the World; which indeed often makes me a little apt to suspect the Sincerity of their Virtue, who are too warmly provoked at other Peoples personal Sins.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all.... I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)