Before a movie about her life began filming, if you'd asked, Eva Piper wouldn't have been able to cast the actress to play her.
Maybe Bette Davis, she suggests. Or Audrey Hepburn?
Now, when people say the one-time Plano teacher looks like Kate Bosworth, who plays her in 90 Minutes in Heaven,they're not playing the celebrity look-alike game.
Even so, Piper, 62, can only laugh in response. "In your dreams," she says back.
Life these days does sometimes feel like a dream to Piper. In 1989, Don Piper, her pastor husband, was in a car crash. He was dead and in heaven for 90 minutes, he says, before prayer brought him back to life.
A movie about that experience, with Hayden Christensen as Don Piper, opens in theaters Friday.
Though the movie's based on Don Piper's book of the same title — a New York Times best-seller that sold 7 million copies — and the couple has shared their story with countless people, it's still a little unbelievable for Eva Piper. "I'm still pinching myself," she says.
The couple was on the set during filming, and Eva attended a July premiere in Plano.
For several years after the crash, the couple lived in Plano, where Eva Piper taught at Mitchell Elementary School in Far North Dallas and was honored as the school's teacher of the year. Daughter Nicole graduated from Plano Senior High School in 1994. The couple lives in Pasadena.
When Don Piper's car was crushed by a semi-tractor truck, he incurred devastating physical injuries. The movie shows his path to recovery in full, raw detail. While Don was in the hospital, Eva — 36 at the time — had to make major decisions on their behalf, something she'd never done before.
"I felt like I'd been dumped in the deep end of the pool," she says. A bedazzled cross and pearl necklace hangs around her neck, a reminder of the couple's decades-long journey.
Piper has watched the movie, which she called "very true to the book and very true to our life," six times. "It's still hard for me to watch the scenes that bring back very painful memories."
To the critics who question parts or all of Don and Eva Piper's story, Eva Piper says: "Sit down and just talk to us." She can't force anyone to believe her, she says, but she wants them to know that her husband is "the last person to make up something like this."
She hopes seeing 90 Minutes in Heaven will help moviegoers learn that heaven is real, but she also wants the movie to impart the lessons that she had to learn the hard way.
Although her husband penned the titular book, 90 Minutes in Heaven is a movie largely about Eva Piper's experience.
"Don always calls me the hero of the story," she says. "I don't feel like a hero. I just did what needed to be done."
Emma Court is a former intern at The Dallas Morning News.
