Born: November 10, 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia, USADied: 20 December 2009 (heart failure)
Job Titles: Actor, Singer
Family
Father: Angelo Bertolotti. An Italian American racketeering criminal; has had little contact with her father since her parents divorced
Mother: Sharon Murphy. Irish American and Eastern European descent; divorced Brittany s father when she was a baby
On December 20, 2009, Murphy died suddenly after going into cardiac arrest. At the time of her death, she had several films in post-production, yet to be released.
Actress Brittany Murphy made a Hollywood specialty of playing rough-around-the-edges chums and lovers. After guest starring roles in TV series like Blossom and Party of Five, she made her feature film debut in Clueless (1995) as Tai, the low-rent ugly duckling befriended by Alicia Silverstone's sleek Cher. Murphy won good reviews as Daisy, Winona Ryder's suicidal fellow mental patient in Girl, Interrupted (1999). She followed that with supporting roles in a string of "chick flicks" including Sidewalks of New York (2001) and Riding In Cars With Boys (2002, with Drew Barrymore). Murphy gradually remade herself from dowdy brunette to slim and sultry blonde: she played Eminem's fame-hungry girlfriend in 8 Mile, the 2002 film inspired by the rapper's life, the waitress Shellie in the violent comic book drama Sin City (2005, with Bruce Willis) and the noodle-master-in-training of The Ramen Girl (2008). Murphy also provided the voice of Luanne in the long-running animated series King of the Hill.
Murphy married screenwriter Simon Monjack in May 2007. She had been engaged to film crew electrician Joe Macaluso in December of 2005; they had split in August of 2006. She had previously been engaged to Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of the talent management company The Firm... She provided vocals on Paul Oakenfold's single Faster Kill Pussycat, a dance club hit in 2006.
Biography
Brittany Murphy first came to the attention of film audiences as Tai, one of Alicia Silverstone's airhead friends, in the 1995 comedy Clueless. Though convincing as a dim-bulb character, Murphy cuts dramatically against this grain off-camera, as a ferociously intelligent and ambitious young performer who had acting in her blood from early childhood. As a teenager and young adult, she gave expression to the scope of her talent and versatility with a series of engaging film and television roles.
Born in Atlanta on November 10, 1977, Murphy was raised by her single mother in Edison, New Jersey; she later indicated, in interviews, that her mom struggled financially - that they were forced to eat spaghetti night after night, and that on certain occasions, she had to beg her mother to buy clothes at KMart; this would later account for Murphy's marked social investment in homeless causes, as discussed in a February 2003 Glamour article.
A precocious child who began putting on shows when she was a toddler, Murphy was acting in regional theatre productions by the age of nine. Work in various commercials followed, and in 1990 she landed her first television appearance at the age of twelve, on the sitcom Blossom. She also secured a supporting role as Brenda Drexell, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Dabney Coleman's fifth grade teacher Otis Drexell, on the (mercifully) short-lived 1991 FOX sitcom Drexell's Class. The following year, Murphy took her first cinematic bow in the dysfunctional family drama Family Prayers.
Murphy's talent for portraying, dramatically, all degrees on the spectrum of behavioral dysfunction further came to light in three successive projects through 1999: the blackly comic Reese Witherspoon trailer trash odyssey Freeway (1996) (as a disfigured lesbian who befriends Witherspoon's Vanessa); a mental patient in Lloyd Kramer's made-for-TV David and Lisa (1998), and James Mangold's Girl, Interrupted (1999) (as yet another resident at a mental institution).
Meanwhile, on a less ambitious (albeit more whimsical) note, Murphy also became a fixtureon King of the Hill, Mike Judge's long-running contemporary cartoon of suburban life in the southern U.S., as Luanne Platter, the hair stylist niece who comes to live with Hank Hill's family. Murphy kept a full plate as the millennium wrapped. In addition to her work for Mangold in 1999,
she also explored the collective insanity of the beauty pageant world in Drop Dead Gorgeous, while on the small screen, she covered much darker thematic ground with the well-received Holocaust drama The Devil's Arithmetic (also 1999). In 2001, Murphy appeared in the Michael Douglas thriller Don't Say a Word, and alongside Drew Barrymore in Riding in Cars With Boys.
Cast opposite Eminem in director Curtis Hanson's 2002 drama 8 Mile, Murphy performed compellingly as an aspiring rap star's unapologetic muse; in 2004, Murphy headlined Nick Hurran's thoroughly disappointing rom-com Little Black Book. She also made a splash in Robert Rodriguez's innovative graphic novel adaptation Sin City, as the arrogant waitress who becomes the prize in a heated rivalry between Benicio del Toro and Clive Owen.
Murphy made appearances in four features in 2006. In Alex Keshishian's progressive romantic comedy Love and Other Disasters, she played a London-based American expatriate, employed at Vogue, who tries to fix up her gay roommate; in Ed Burns's sixth directorial outing, the Big Chill-like romantic comedy The Groomsmen, she played the expectant girlfriend of Burns's Paulie. She also portrayed a member of the ensemble in Karen Moncrieff's murder mystery The Dead Girl, about a group of seemingly disconnected individuals whose lives intersect as a girl's murderer comes to light, and one of the lead voices in George "Babe" Miller's Happy Feet, an animated penguin tale.
Murphy's appearance alongside Ashton Kutcher in Just Married was - to some degree - a case of art imitating life: offscreen, Murphy and Kutcher began to date as well (and became a hot tabloid item), though unlike their onscreen counterparts, they never wed. Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide