Brittany Murphy

• 1. Introduction

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  Brittany Murphy stood on the stage of the 2003 Independent Spirit Awards with a very simple job. She was to read the names of five nominees, open an envelope and announce the winner. Instead, the American actress and singer turned the moment into screwball comedy. She pretended she could not follow the sequence, even after the audience shouted instructions and a stage manager whispered in her ear twice. The critic Roger Ebert wrote that some people in the room were dumbfounded by her stupidity, but "I was dumbfounded by her brilliance." He often praised her comic timing and compared her to Lucille Ball.

  Murphy's career ran from television bit parts to Broadway, from animated sitcoms to dance clubs, and from teen comedies to serious dramas. Her story raises questions that this documentary will follow. How did a girl from New Jersey, raised with little money, reach Hollywood as a young teenager? Who stood close to her as her fame grew and her health declined? And why, long after her death, do relatives and filmmakers still disagree about what happened?

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• 2. Edison to Hollywood

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  Brittany Anne Bertolotti was born at Georgia Baptist Hospital in Atlanta, the daughter of Sharon Kathleen Murphy and Angelo Joseph Bertolotti. They divorced when she was three. Her mother raised her in Edison, New Jersey, where she attended middle school before the family moved west.

  Angelo Bertolotti's path was very different. He was arrested on drug possession charges during these years and spent twelve years in prison. He also had dealings with the Italian mafia, working as an entrepreneur and diplomat for organized crime families.

  In Edison, money at home was scarce. Murphy later recalled eating spaghetti every night because of her mother's financial troubles, and sometimes having to beg her mother to buy clothes at Kmart. A February 2003 article in Glamour magazine connected those memories to her later interest in homeless causes.

  Performing came early. In 1982 she enrolled at the Verne Fowler School of Dance and Theater Arts in Colonia, and from the age of four she trained in singing, dancing and acting. In 1987, at ten, she made her theatrical debut in Really Rosie and also sang in a production of Les Misérables. Looking back, she said, "my first memories were wanting... to entertain people."

  In 1991, before she started high school, the family relocated to Los Angeles so that Murphy could pursue acting. She said her mother never tried to stifle her creativity: "When I asked my mom to move to California, she sold everything and moved out here for me. She always believed in me."

  Murphy Brown gave her first television credit that same year, as Frank's sister in a single episode. At thirteen she landed her first Hollywood job, playing Brenda Drexell in Drexell's Class, and then Molly Morgan in Almost Home. She guest starred on Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Blossom, seaQuest 2032, Murder One and Frasier. She also held recurring roles on Party of Five, Boy Meets World and Sister, Sister. Her second feature film was about to change the scale of her career.

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• 3. Clueless and After

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  Filming of Clueless began in November 1994, when Murphy was barely seventeen and the youngest member of the cast. Because she could not attend high school, she worked with educational tutors. Amy Heckerling directed the teen comedy, which loosely adapts Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma and gives many of its characters a counterpart in the book. Murphy played Tai Frasier. The film was a sleeper hit and grew a cult following.

  John Menter, an acting teacher from Murphy's childhood, remembered the moment he knew what was coming: "It wasn't until I saw her, sitting in the theater, who I felt she would be a huge star."

  Alicia Silverstone, her co-star, described Murphy's audition in 2023. It was the first time Silverstone had sat in a casting room without auditioning herself, since she was there to help with chemistry reads. When Murphy left, Silverstone remembered saying to the room, "You guys! Did you see that?"

  Not long after Clueless reached theaters, Sharon Murphy was diagnosed with breast cancer, and her daughter took on the work of caring for her.

  In 1997 Murphy made her Broadway debut as Catherine in a new version of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, alongside Anthony LaPaglia and Allison Janney. Film roles continued with Freeway in 1996, which also starred Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland, and the independent comedy Bongwater in 1998.

  In 1999 she played Rivkah in the television film The Devil's Arithmetic, based on Jane Yolen's novel and directed by Donna Deitch. Filming took place in Lithuania and Canada in October 1998. Variety reviewer David Kronke wrote that she "brought a strange but intriguing ethereal quality to her performance."

  That same year came James Mangold's Girl, Interrupted, in which she played Daisy Randone, a troubled psychiatric patient, beside Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. The role brought a Young Artists Awards nomination for Best Young Lead Actress in a Feature Film, on the 19th of March 2000. She also played Lisa Swenson, an aspiring beauty queen, in Drop Dead Gorgeous. Ryder would become one of her closest friends in the years that followed.

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• 4. Behind the Microphone

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  Luanne Platter, a character in the Fox animated sitcom King of the Hill, was voiced by Murphy for the show's entire original run, from 1997 to 2009. She also voiced Joseph Gribble until the fifth season. She liked the work because it could be done from home, joking, "You can do it even in your pajamas." In 2000 she received an Annie Award nomination for the episode "Movin' On Up."

  Madonna was the singer Murphy named as her main musical influence. As a child she decided she would become "my own version of Madonna." She learned piano and trumpet young, and she said she could pick up an instrument after only twenty minutes of practice.

  "My singing voice isn't like my speaking voice," she once said. She explained that she had kept it quiet because she wanted to learn the studio side of recording. Some of the singers on albums she worked on did not even know it was her.

  In the early 1990s she belonged to a band called Blessed Soul with fellow actor Eric Balfour, but no album followed. A studio album of her own never materialized either. Her demos stayed unreleased, except for a song called "Boomlay", which leaked onto the internet unfinished, with part of the recording lost.

  On the 6th of June 2006 she and British DJ Paul Oakenfold released "Faster Kill Pussycat", from his album A Lively Mind. The song reached number one on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play chart and number seven in the United Kingdom that June.

  Happy Feet, the critically acclaimed 2006 animated feature, gave her the part of Gloria, a penguin. She also covered Queen's "Somebody to Love" and Earth, Wind & Fire's "Boogie Wonderland" for the film. "Oddly enough, of all the characters I've played, Gloria is the most like me," she said. George Miller wanted one performer for both the speaking and the singing. She asked him for a chance and recalled, "I don't think he took me very seriously, because most actors say they can do most things." Both covers made it onto the soundtrack.

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• 5. Hits and Misses

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  Michael Douglas starred opposite her in Don't Say a Word in 2001, with Murphy as the patient Elisabeth Burrows. The thriller received negative reviews.

  In 2002 she played Alex Latourno in 8 Mile, a film based on the life of the rapper Eminem. It earned critical acclaim and succeeded at the box office.

  Uptown Girls paired her with Dakota Fanning. Murphy played Molly Gunn, a twenty-two-year-old whose late father had been a musician. Filming ran from July to September 2002 at Silvercup Studios in New York.

  Just Married, released in 2003, grossed more than 100 million dollars against a budget of 18 million. Reviews were negative, and its two leads were nominated for Razzie Awards, including worst on-screen couple. Around then her mother's breast cancer returned, and Murphy again became her caregiver.

  Little Black Book in 2004, with Murphy as Stacy Holt, was another critical failure, and reviewers focused on her performance. It opened at number five at the North American box office, behind Collateral, The Village, The Bourne Supremacy and The Manchurian Candidate.

  Sin City in 2005 put her in a film directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino. She also made independent films, including Spun, Neverwas, Karen Moncrieff's The Dead Girl, and Edward Burns's Sidewalks of New York and The Groomsmen. In 2008 she both acted in and produced The Ramen Girl.

  In 2009 she took the lead as Cilla in the Lifetime television movie Tribute. In June of that year she completed the thriller Abandoned, which came out in 2010. Then, in November 2009, she left The Caller, which was filming in Puerto Rico, and Rachelle Lefevre replaced her. Murphy denied reports that she had been fired for being difficult on set and cited "creative differences". Her final film, Something Wicked, reached audiences in 2014.

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• 6. Love and Friendship

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  Late in 2002, Murphy began dating Ashton Kutcher, her co-star in Just Married. Director Shawn Levy said, "From the minute they met, they were together, they laughed all the time, they made jokes and they looked happy." Both were seen wearing rings, which suggested an engagement that was never officially confirmed.

  Jeff Kwatinetz, a talent manager, later became her fiance, but that relationship lasted only four months. In December 2005 she was with Joe Macaluso, a production assistant she met on Little Black Book. They broke up in 2006.

  After 8 Mile opened in 2002, rumors spread of a romance with her co-star Eminem. Asked on the Late Show with David Letterman whether they had dated, she answered, "Yes, of course," and added, laughing, "Well, it went. It came and went." It was later confirmed that they never had a relationship. She told The Morning Call that she was a fan: "He's brilliant...he's a brilliant guy." After her death, Eminem told Vibe that it affected him greatly and that he feared dying under similar circumstances. He called her "a very good person."

  Winona Ryder, who acted beside her in Girl, Interrupted, became a close friend in the early 2000s. In a September 2001 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Murphy called Ryder her "definitive mentor." She joked about her own early look: "I look at old photos of the premiere of Clueless and I look like a meatball on top of another meatball."

  A kiss between the two women in a Mercedes, with photographers in front of the car, set off theories that Murphy was a lesbian. She rejected them, saying, "This was my presentation to the media, the cover of the National Enquirer." She added, "we just kissed as a joke."

  After Murphy died, Ryder told Total Film that she found Girl, Interrupted hard to watch. "I was very close to Brittany, even in the moments before her death," she said.

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• 7. Marriage and Health

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  Simon Monjack, a British screenwriter, met Murphy on the set of The White Hotel, where she acted and he directed. The film was never released, and its production stopped. They met months after her split with Macaluso.

  At a public dinner with the filmmaker Allison Burnett, Monjack told the guests he was a multimillionaire. He said he had dated Elle Macpherson and Madonna, owned a collection of Ferraris, and had been dying of brain cancer until a treatment made from shark fins saved him. These claims were later revealed to be false, and the media suspected Murphy had been deceived.

  His former fiancee, Elizabeth Ragsdale, said in the 2021 miniseries What Happened, Brittany Murphy? that he told her he had spinal cancer and needed shark cartilage treatments. After he abandoned her while she was pregnant, she contacted his mother, Linda Monjack, and realized the story was fake. Linda defended her son. She said he developed extreme paranoia after his father, William Monjack, died of cancer, adding, "I certainly don't think he went out and told people he had cancer. I think he believed it."

  Murphy's friends were alarmed. Kathy Najimy recalled telling her, when Murphy said she wanted to marry him, "Honey, it hasn't been enough." Her friend Lisa Rieffel said, "Simon took her away. He made sure no one could get to her." In that same miniseries, several of Monjack's colleagues and friends accused him of responsibility for Murphy's physical changes and of keeping her from her family.

  In May 2007 the couple married in a private Jewish ceremony in Los Angeles, without announcing an engagement beforehand. For the last three and a half years of her life, Murphy, her mother and Monjack shared the mansion where Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake had once lived.

  In the early 2000s Murphy lost a significant amount of weight, which fed rumors of cocaine use, bulimia or anorexia. In 2005 she told Jane magazine, "No, just for the record I have never tried it in my entire life." She also appeared in a fifteen-minute anti-smoking campaign for young people, shown to more than 10,000 schools as part of the program "Right Decisions, Right Now". Her mother said she also had diabetes.

  Melanie Lynskey told InStyle, "The way she saw herself always broke my heart." The director Trista Jordan said she had never seen anyone so thin and that, getting up from a chair, Murphy "looked like Bambi." The weakness Jordan described would matter later, when the coroner wrote about Murphy's weakened state.

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• 8. Death and Aftermath

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  At 8:00 a.m. on the 20th of December 2009, the Los Angeles Fire Department answered a medical request at the home Murphy shared with her husband. She had apparently collapsed in a bathroom. Firefighters tried to resuscitate her at the scene, and she was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She died there at 10:05 a.m. after going into cardiac arrest, at the age of 32.

  An autopsy took place the day after. In a report issued in February 2010, the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office ruled the death accidental. It named pneumonia as the cause, with severe iron-deficiency anemia and multiple drug intoxication as secondary factors. The coroner found a range of over-the-counter and prescription medications in her system, most likely taken to treat a cold or respiratory infection. They included elevated levels of hydrocodone, a prescription narcotic, along with acetaminophen, L-methamphetamine and chlorpheniramine. The report added that "the possible adverse physiological effects of elevated levels of these medications cannot be discounted, especially in her weakened state." She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills on the 24th of December 2009.

  In January 2010, Monjack and Sharon Murphy said she used no alcohol or other drugs and that drugs had not caused her death. They pointed instead to a heart condition, mitral valve prolapse.

  On the 23rd of May 2010, Monjack was found dead at the same Hollywood Hills residence. The coroner attributed his death to acute pneumonia and severe anemia. Reports said the county health department had considered toxic mold in the house as a possible factor. Ed Winter of the coroner's office said there were "no indicators" that mold played a part, and Sharon Murphy called the reports "absurd". In December 2011 she reversed course and announced that toxic mold had killed her daughter and son-in-law. She filed a lawsuit against the attorneys who had represented her in an earlier suit against the home's builders.

  In January 2012, Murphy's father, Angelo Bertolotti, asked the Superior Court of California to order the coroner to hand over her hair samples for independent testing. The case was dismissed seven months later, after he failed to attend two hearings. In November 2013 he claimed that a toxicology report showed deliberate poisoning by heavy metals, including antimony and barium, as a possible cause. Sharon Murphy called the claim "a smear".

  The Brittany Murphy Foundation began in January 2010 as a charitable fund for children's arts education, the USO and cancer research. It launched on the 4th of February 2010 at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills. A records search then showed that its not-for-profit status had never been filed, and the foundation refunded the donations it had received. Bertolotti relaunched it on the 10th of November 2013. By early 2026 it appeared to have ceased operations, according to the information service GuideStar.

  The Brittany Murphy Story aired on Lifetime on the 6th of September 2014, with Amanda Fuller as Murphy, Sherilyn Fenn as her mother and Eric Petersen as Monjack. Reviews were negative, and critics faulted Fuller's performance. In 2020, Investigation Discovery aired Brittany Murphy: An ID Mystery, whose makers suggested that Monjack and Sharon Murphy may have contributed to her death. Bertolotti says in it that he always believed they were involved in both deaths, which Sharon Murphy has denied.

  On the 14th of October 2021, HBO Max premiered the two-part What Happened, Brittany Murphy?, featuring Najimy, Taryn Manning, Rieffel and Amy Heckerling. Reporter Amber Ryland, who interviewed Monjack after Murphy died, asked, "Could he have killed his wife?" Ragsdale said she thought Monjack, "even if he didn't kill Brittany Murphy, allowed her to die because he didn't take her to a doctor and get her help." Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter called the series "20 percent a reminder of Murphy's transcendent talent, 30 percent a dead-end investigation into the mystery of her death, and 50 percent an unilluminating examination of Murphy's late husband." Rotten Tomatoes gave it 19 percent. In 2023 Tubi released Gone Before Her Time: Brittany Murphy, which features her Clueless co-star Stacey Dash.

  Writing for Dazed Digital on the 15th of November 2017, Adam White called Murphy "small, but magnetic" and argued that she died too young to establish an adequate legacy. Dakota Fanning, her co-star in Uptown Girls, offered a simpler judgment. She said she was "very grateful to have had the opportunity to work together."

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