Rebecca Gayheart has revealed that Eric Dane spent some of his final weeks working on an urgent personal project, using artificial intelligence to restore his voice before ALS robbed him of it entirely.
Gayheart, 54, spoke to Variety about her late husband’s collaboration with AI firm ElevenLabs in the weeks before his death on 19th February at the age of 53.
Dane, who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis just ten months before he died, had been losing his ability to speak as the disease progressed.
“He 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,” Gayheart recalled.
ElevenLabs’ Impact Program, which provides free licences to individuals with accessibility needs, uses past recordings to create a synthetic voice for people in Dane’s situation.
The moment they heard the finished result together was one Gayheart will not forget.
“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,” she said.
“We played it, and Eric became visibly emotional. And when I heard it, I cried. I think everyone in the room did.”
She added that Dane had wanted to use the experience to advocate more broadly for ALS awareness and the wider movement around voice restoration technology.
“For a million people to get a voice to be able to communicate with their children or their loved ones or their caretakers or their doctors or in their job, this is a really huge movement,” she said.
“He wanted to advocate for love and for the movement and so I’m there to do this for him.”
Gayheart and Dane, best known for his roles in Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria, met in 2003 and married the following year.
They separated in 2018 but remained close, and Gayheart became one of his primary carers during his illness.
The couple share two daughters, Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14. Dane’s family confirmed his passing in a statement to PEOPLE, describing him as a “passionate advocate for awareness and research” who was surrounded by friends, his wife, and his daughters in his final days.
