It has been more than a decade since the beloved actress Brittany murphy He died at age 32, but fans haven’t stopped searching for answers about the events that led to his death.
The new HBO Max documentary, What happened, Brittany Murphy?, released Thursday, October 14, attempts to shed some light on the late star’s life, with interviews from friends and colleagues who knew her well.
“Brittany never said a nasty word about anyone, ever.” Marti Faulknersays a friend of the Murphy family in the film. “She was very funny”.
Amy heckerling, who led the Georgia native in the 1995 classic Cluelesshe told the director Cynthia hill that the pleasant attitude of the actress was reflected in the camera. It was one of the reasons why he decided to choose Murphy, who was only 17 years old at the time, as Tai.
“She just felt like a sweet girl who didn’t fit in with everyone else, and she was trying and being nice, but she was lost in this world,” explains 67-year-old Heckerling. “And that’s exactly what I was looking for.”
Although the Uptown Girls star was known for her roles in movies like Drop Dead Gorgeous, Sin City other Girl interrupted, his career began a downward turn at the same time he married Simon Monjack in May 2007. With the exception of his dubbing work for King of the hill, most of his later roles were in horror films and direct-to-video thrillers.
On What happened, Brittany Murphy?, several of the interviewed subjects make it clear that they believe that Monjack was, at least in part, the culprit of the Just Married the decadent career of the star. (The London-born producer died in 2010, just five months after his wife.)
“I started to feel some red flags,” he says. Alex Merkin, who directed Murphy in Across the hall, one of his last films. “There was something, I don’t mean adoration, about their relationship, but it seemed to border on that. It’s something that feels completely unhealthy, something that feels delusional on some level. A manipulative maneuver on his part to control her and keep his hooks on her. “
After Murphy’s death, the Los Angeles County coroner said the leading cause of his death was pneumonia, but his late father, Angelo Bertolotti, believed something more sinister was at stake. In 2013, he claimed that a toxicology report showed the presence of heavy metals in her system, leading him to believe she was poisoned.
The documentary addresses those claims, but ultimately concludes that the coroner’s initial report was correct. “This was not something that I had just received the day before,” said Dr. Lisa scheinin, a retired deputy coroner, said about Murphy’s pneumonia. “She’s been walking around with this for some time.”
Keep scrolling to see more reveals from the new documentary: