Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, best-selling gothic tales, including "Interview With a Vampire," reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes, died late Saturday due to complications from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice. She was 80.
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"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 directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It's also set to be adapted again in an upcoming TV series on AMC and AMC+ set to premiere next year.
In Rice's "Vampire Chronicles," some critics saw only cheap eroticism. But others, including millions of readers, saw the most consequential interpretation of vampires since Bram Stoker.
Rice's longtime editor, Victoria Wilson, recalled her as "a fierce storyteller who wrote large, lived quietly, and imagined worlds on a grand scale. She summoned the feelings of an age long before we knew what they were," Wilson said in a statement. "As a writer, she was decades ahead of her time."
Rice will be interred during a private ceremony at a family mausoleum in New Orleans, her family said.
