Her mother’s death impacted Heaton “greatly,” and the actor described it as “a severe mercy.”
“In many ways I benefited from it, but of course nobody wishes that for themselves,” she said. “You know, we’re Irish Catholic from Cleveland. This was in the 70s. There were no therapists around. So you basically sucked it up as the Irish tend to do and move along and you don’t really talk about it.”
“And I think also I felt so terrible for my father that I didn’t want to express my own grief and my fear,” she explained, “so I kind of bottled it all up for a long time, and it led to depression and a sort of, just live life because you don’t know when you’re going to be called out.”
“There’s a lot of partying and drinking,” Heaton said, “and just sort of, a kind of throwaway kind of attitude toward life that I think partially stemmed from that.”
The desire to act and perform for others was in Heaton from an early age. After graduating college, she moved to New York to pursue a career in acting, which she did for nine years without “getting anywhere.”
“But all that time I was going to a lot of different churches, a lot of actors prayer groups and Broadway gospel groups and things like that,” she said. “So I was seeing a lot of different ways of being with God in New York in that whole time, including a lot of Jewish friends, too. So that was really wonderful.”
Cavins said, “So you do go to New York, you do continue to pursue the Lord and acting, but you also get involved in the things of the world. And did that cloud everything for you?”
“Yeah, I think part of being an extrovert is you just have a lot of energy and a lot of times that will include partying,” Heaton said. “I wasn’t a club person, but as an Irish person, I like to drink a lot. And so, there was kind of a lot of that…I was in my 20s and it was New York City and it was brand new, so there was a lot of that.”
“But I never, ever did let go of God,” she added. “And I have a very healthy fear of the Lord. And I think that protected me, and he protected me through those times where I wasn’t living a completely Christian life.”
After nine years of not getting anywhere in her career in New York, Heaton moved to Los Angeles at the suggestion of the man who is now her husband.
“He had an extra companion airline ticket. He said, ‘Why don’t you just come and produce the play in L.A. that you did in New York where you starred in the show?’” said Heaton. “I said, ‘Let’s do that.’”
It was during that first year in Los Angeles that Heaton went on a mission trip with First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood to an orphanage in Tecate, Mexico, and experienced a significant turning point in her journey with the Lord.
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“We had a party for them. We fixed their lawn. We fixed their sewage pipes. And I came back from that, and I had an overwhelming sense of peace, an otherworldly sense of peace that I had not had ever in my life up to that point,” she told Cavins. Until, then, “the goal of my life was to become an actress and that was it. That was the center and that was the focus of my life.”
