Kathy Najimy, her King of the Hill co-star, recalls Murphy saying, “That’s what I’ve been told: If I want to be considered a leading lady, I have to lose a lot of weight.” In 1999, Murphy, already a rising star, started visibly losing weight and dyeing her hair blonde. Instead, it focuses largely on her husband. Yet the film has been criticized for its fixation on her death, which some critics found exploitative, especially given that it doesn’t seem to reveal much new information about Murphy or how she died. Much like the many recent reconsiderations of Britney Spears, the documentary revisits the public scrutiny that drove Murphy to a place where she could be victimized by someone like Monjack. And yet Monjack and her mother, who were in the house while she was sick, maintained in interviews that she was perfectly healthy until the day she died. The reality, according to her medical examiner, is that her body essentially collapsed: starved of nutrition, addled by drugs, and in desperate need of medical attention for an illness that started as a mild flu. The documentary presents him as a pathological liar who preyed on Murphy and her mother, isolating them and draining their money while also encouraging Murphy’s use of prescription pills and dangerous weight loss. According to What Happened, Brittany Murphy?, a new two-part HBO documentary, many of the questions surrounding her death lead to her husband. Others claim she died from black mold, while fans have cooked up elaborate conspiracies involving cover-ups. Some, including her father, say she was poisoned. Over the past decade, there has been more hearsay than fact about what happened. What 32-year-old dies of pneumonia? To make things even stranger, her husband, a British screenwriter named Simon Monjack, died of similarly mysterious causes five months later. The cause of death only added further confusion to what was shaping up to be a dark mystery. Then, at the age of 32, she collapsed on her bathroom floor, dying of what a medical examiner would ultimately deem pneumonia. Throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, her star continued to rise: She showed up in 8 Mile alongside Eminem and in Just Married with Ashton Kutcher, both of whom she also dated. He controlled her by confiscating her phone and was in charge of her finances.In 1995, Brittany Murphy was a young Hollywood starlet who’d just found her breakthrough role in Clueless, where she played a hapless, cheery new girl who gets taken in by the popular crowd. She rose to fame fast with movies '8-mile' and 'Clueless' that she met other A-list celebrities and met people at parties, including her husband Monjack, a British writer-director-photographer at a party in 2006 when she was 29-years-old and he was 37-years-old.Ī year later the two married in her home in Hollywood Hills, however, apparently ever since they got married, friends of Brittany at the time said he was very manipulative and tried to take control over her entire life and career by managing her himself and firing her entire team. Murphy grew up with her mother most of her life as her father Angelo Bertolotti was pretty much out of the picture because he was a mobster in New York, and in 2003 he was found guilty of racketeering, organized crime, and counterfeit scamming.Īs a teen, Murphy moved to California with her mother and that's when her career in acting started.

And, according to some source were sharing a bed together. It was never reported if the two had any sexual relationship.

Simon monjack interview