Eric Dane to be remembered with public memorial
Eric Dane will be honoured with a public memorial following his death last month, though the details have yet to be announced.
Eric Dane will be honoured with a public memorial following his death last month.
The Grey's Anatomy star passed away on 19 February at the age of 53 after battling degenerative neurological disorder ALS, and it has now been revealed fans will get the chance to pay their last respects to Eric with a special event.
A source close to his widow Rebecca Gayheart told TMZ that the family have been deeply moved by the condolences and tributes that have flooded in from around the world, and it convinced them to arrange a public celebration of life.
The event will be for the fans but also to make Eric "smile and feel loved and know that his life was not in vain."
Rebecca, 54, recently spoke out about Eric's death and admitted she and their daughters Billie, 15, and 14-year-old Georgia are still "in a state of shock".
She told Variety: “I just want to thank everybody for being so kind to us during the last couple of years. It’s been challenging and meaningful, and people are kind.
“I’m having trouble receiving all of the support and love coming at me from every which way because of Eric and the [entertainment] community that’s so generous with their time.
"They’ve been holding me and the girls up the last two weeks, and I don’t think they’re going anywhere. I think they’re in it for the long haul. Hollywood gets a bad rap. That kind of makes me mad, because we have a lovely community of people, and I’m so grateful for them.”
In the final weeks of his life, Eric took part in an AI voice restoration project with ElevenLabs, which helped restore his ability to communicate via a synthetic voice created using past recordings of his own speech and he was "visibly emotional" when he was presented with what the company had managed to achieve.
Rebecca said: "[Eric] was really excited about it, because he was losing his voice, and it was becoming more difficult for him to communicate each and every day. So it became sort of urgent.
“He was waiting anxiously to hear it, and when we got it from ElevenLabs it was a really big moment. It was a powerful moment. We played it, and Eric became visibly emotional.
“And when I heard it, I cried. I think everyone in the room did.”
A few days after Eric got the ElevenLabs voice system, the couple played it for their daughters and the family's only disappointment is that the Euphoria star didn't get the time to use it to its full potential.
Rebecca said: “They were like, that’s not a recording. That’s your voice. That’s you. So it was spot on. He just had this way of speaking, and they captured it so beautifully.
"[Our daughters] signed off on it, and we were thrilled to have it because we knew what was coming down the pike.
“We were all really struggling with the voice loss that he was already experiencing. Knowing we had that in our back pocket, just felt really good. I’m sad, and I know Eric is too, that we didn’t ever get to really use it."
