Heather Donahue goes from 'Blair' to book
Heather Donahue turns the camera on herself during her confession scene from the 1999 low-budget horror film, "The Blair Witch Project." Credit: Artisan Entertainment
Actress Heather Donahue, star of the 1999 sleeper hit "The Blair Witch Project," left the film industry in the mid-2000s to teach meditation and live on a farm in Northern California -- where for a year she grew medical marijuana, an adventure she chronicles in an upcoming memoir, "GrowGirl."
After "Blair Witch," "The acting projects I was lucky enough to work on weren't always things that I felt good about putting out into the world," Donahue, who turned 37 Thursday, writes on her website. "I didn't see that getting better as I got older. I wanted to change my life, see what else was out there for me, what else I might become. So I burned most of the stuff from my life in L.A. (resumés, head shots, lingerie, lint) in the desert and moved to pretty little Nuggettown," the fictitious name she gives her community for anonymity's sake.
A since-ended romance with a resident led Donahue -- whose other screen work includes the Syfy miniseries "Taken" (2002) and guest roles on "Without a Trace" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" -- to life in a rented house with a little farmland plus equipment to grow pot indoors.
"Where I live," she says, "pot is legal" for medicinal use, and a source of income for "single moms trying to send their kids to good schools, people trying to keep their houses or pay down their debts, grannies whose pensions aren't cutting it." She no longer grows it, though, she says.
The legacy of "Blair Witch" -- a critically well-received, faux-documentary horror film shot in eight days for well under a million dollars and which grossed more than $248 million worldwide -- "has been on me for most of my adult life, sometimes like a stench, sometimes like a badge of honor," Donahue says on her site.
"Like anything big that happens to a person, it's its own down and upside. . . . I had money and freedom in my 20s, which is a pretty amazing time to have both of those things. That being said, I like that it defines me less now."
Her memoir is due out Jan. 5 from Gotham Books.
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