Dartmouth’s Tupper becomes Heche’s love interest on and off the set report



Entertainment Tonight is reporting that Anne Heche has left her husband, Coley Laffoon, for her Men in Trees co-star James Tupper.

Dartmouth native Tupper, who studied in Dalhousie’s Theatre program before earning an acting degree from Montreal’s Concordia University and a master’s degree from Rutgers University in New York, has split his time between film and TV projects and stage work since moving to the U.S. about 10 years ago.

In an August 2006 interview with The Chronicle Herald, he said he was based in Los Angeles, but recently moved to Vancouver with his wife of five years, Kate Mayfield, a novelist from Iowa, and his dog Harold, a very friendly half-Great Dane, half-Retriever, to film the ABC series, currently airing on Thursday nights at 11 p.m.

On the show, Tupper, is a wildlife biologist who has an on-again, off-again relationship with Heche, who plays a relationship coach in the small, mostly male, Alaska town of Elmo.

A spokesperson for Tupper, 41, said the actor and his wife split in November, but would not speculate on the on-set romance, according to etonline.com. The same article says that Heche’s rep confirms that the 36-year-old actor and her 33-year-old husband Laffoon, an actor and cameraman, have separated. The two were married in 2001 and have a son, Homer, together.

In August, Tupper described Heche to The Chronicle Herald: "She’s the warmest, kindest, most humble person I’ve ever met. She’s fun, kind to everyone on the set. She’s lived through a lot, and knows how valuable it is to have a great script. We often get together to run lines in her trailer."

The Prince Andrew high school grad said last summer that the first conversation he had with Heche was about Halifax, where she filmed TV movies Fatal Desire (with Eric Roberts) and Gracie’s Choice with Dianne Ladd and Kristen Bell and Heche reported she loved the city.

James Tupper’s father, also named James Tupper, was a former principal at Notting Park School and Admiral Westphal Elementary in Dartmouth, and his grandfather, Borden Tupper was a United Church minister in Halifax.

(anemetz@herald.ca)