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Brittany Murphy’s husband found dead

Mon, 24 May 2010 12:42:00 +0000

The husband of Brittany Murphy was found dead at his Los Angeles home late Sunday, five months after the Hollywood actress died, police said.

Firefighters responding to an emergency call found British screenwriter Simon Monjack dead at the Hollywood Hills residence, police spokesman Sgt. Louie Lozano said.

The preliminary cause of the 39-year-old Monjack's death is natural causes, he told The Associated Press.

"We concluded there no signs of foul play or any criminal activity involved," said Sgt. Alex Ortiz, another police spokesman.

Ortiz said that the Los Angeles Coroner's Office was taking over the investigation because criminal activity had been ruled out, and would provide more details later on the death and circumstances surrounding it.

Firefighters rushed to the home after receiving a call from a female occupant at 9:40 p.m. Sunday, but Ortiz said he didn't know who then name of the caller.

At his wife's funeral in December, a visibly emotional Monjack talked about their relationship and called her his best friend and soul mate. The two married in 2007.

He had said that they had been planning a family and contemplating a move to New York.

Full autopsy for actor Brittany Murphy released

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:10:00 +0000

Brittany Murphy's autopsy report details how pneumonia, severe anemia and prescription medications killed the "8 Mile" actress.

The report released Thursday states the 32-year-old actress' menstrual period left her in a weakened state after contracting pneumonia. The report states prescription medications found in Murphy's system were consistent with treatment of a cold or respiratory illness, but contributed to her death.

The actress had been complaining of severe abdominal pain for seven to 10 days before her death. But the report states the actress' husband and mother thought it was related to Murphy's period, which they told investigators was often severe.

Murphy died Dec. 20 and her death has been ruled accidental.

Did doctor shopping kill Brittany Murphy?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:23:00 +0000

There was a time when a celebrity's sudden death almost invariably meant illegal drugs, a secret stash of heroin (Janis Joplin), a fatal speedball (John Belushi). More recently, stars' poison of choice is the legal and prescribed kind: Health Ledger OD'd on cold medicine; Anna Nicole Smith took sleep aids; Michael Jackson pumped himself full of anesthetics. And so it seems with Brittany Murphy, the bubbly and bright actress who died of cardiac arrest at 32.

The coroner's notes allegedly claim a pharmacopia in Murphy's bathroom cabinet: Topamax (for seizures or migraines), methylprednisolone (a steroid), fluoxetine (an antidepressant), Klonopin (for anxiety), carbamazepine (for seizures or bipolar disorder), Ativan (for anxiety), Vicoprofen (pain reliever), propranolol (for hypertension, migraines or anxiety), Biaxin (an antibiotic), and hydrocodone (a narcotic pain reliever). Gone are the days of shameful crack pipes and empty gin bottles. "No alcohol containers, paraphernalia or illegal drugs were discovered," the report stated. If only that could help.

Brittany Murphy’s sad, sudden end

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:01:00 +0000

She was an adorably clueless high schooler. She was a self-destructive mental patient. She was a newlywed. A nanny. A rapper's girlfriend. A barmaid. And a two-dimensional Texas blonde. She was never a marquee star, finding herself instead in the role of the scene-stealing second or third banana. But whether she was playing a penguin or a beauty contestant, Brittany Murphy, who died Sunday morning at the cruelly young age of 32, took every role she played and made her characters loveable and flawed and startlingly, daringly human.

“Little Black Book”

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 20:00:00 +0000

The company behind "Little Black Book," Revolution Studios, has described it as a "dark" comedy. Dismal is more like it, notably for the way the movie takes morally specious behavior, dresses it up to make it cute, teaches the heroine that she did a bad thing that hurt people (a notion that's treated as refreshingly novel) -- and then, in the end, rewards her for her bravery and honesty in having come clean with her dirty deed. If this is dark, it's dark lite.

Brittany Murphy, who seems to have thrown away a promising career as an intriguingly offbeat actress in order to become a kooky, lovable poppet, plays a young woman who becomes suspicious of her laid-back but attentive boyfriend (Ron Livingston) when he offhandedly reveals that he used to date a supermodel. Goaded by one of her co-workers (Holly Hunter) at the low-rent TV talk show she works for (its host is played by a boisterous Kathy Bates), Murphy decides to do some snooping around in her beau's Palm Pilot to find out more about his ex-girlfriends. After stalking them one by one (much ho-hum hilarity ensues), she realizes that she actually likes one of them (Julianne Nicholson, who gives the most forthright and unselfconscious performance in the movie). Imagine that! Ex-girlfriends are people too.

Dude, where’s my star?

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 20:00:00 +0000

"I suppose the crux of their relationship is that to him age doesn't matter and to her size doesn't matter." -- Brittany Murphy, to David Letterman, on ex-boyfriend Ashton Kutcher's relationship with Demi Moore

"Ashton Kutcher better start making better movies if he wants to stay on the cover of People magazine." -- The clerk who sold me my ticket to "My Boss's Daughter"

The backlash against Ashton Kutcher has officially begun, as it often does, about five seconds after people started noticing him in the first place. Still, the ticket clerk is wrong. Kutcher doesn't need to make good movies in order to stay on the cover of People. He just needs celebrity ex-girlfriends insulting his genitalia on national television.

But Kutcher has a lot more than outspoken exes in his arsenal. If Ben and J.Lo have welcomed us into a new world in which celebrity worship is almost indistinguishable from celebrity loathing, then Ashton Kutcher is the rightful ruler of this strange new land, jeering at his own kind from the sidelines even as he ushers a reimagineered Demi Moore down the red carpet.

“Spun”

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 21:00:00 +0000

I hate "Spun." And one of the things that I hate about it is that I liked it so much. It looks horribly great, it has cool stars, and the vaguely indie-rock soundtrack is pretty good. The dizzying sensation of the movie is something like watching an hour and a half's worth of music videos on fast forward. It's a fun movie in a disorienting way, especially if you like hot clothes and can laugh at awful things.

But it's really a low, low movie, the kind of thing that makes you feel bad for liking it. It's moralistic about drug use, but at the same time weirdly glamorizes it by working so hard to make the movie itself so hip. (This is the kind of picture where even the buffoonish cops wear vintage Levi Sta-Prest jeans.) "Spun's" meta-message -- if there is such a thing -- is that drugs are bad, but you probably want to do a lot of them for a while so you can make some cool art or something. In fact, just say "crystal" and the dopest actors in Hollywood will run toward you.

“Just Married”

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 20:00:00 +0000

No actress can take a punch like Brittany Murphy. In "Just Married," she gets zonked in the nose at least twice and thumps her head on the edge of a doorway as her young husband, played by Ashton Kutcher, carries her bumptiously over the threshold on their wedding night. Those are decidedly tired, unfunny gags -- and yet Murphy, who understands that slapstick is an art, plays them so brightly that she makes you feel you've never seen them before. When she's accidentally zapped with a football (thrown, of course, by Kutcher), she doesn't pull the old "Oh! My nose!" Marcia Brady routine. Instead she pops back up with a dizzy, radiant smile, as if it were all in a day's work. She's got a knack for playing ditzy lightness with some intelligence behind it. In a Hollywood universe where virtually no one knows how to either direct or play screwball comedy, she's the closest thing to a Carole Lombard that we've got.

It's too bad that the movie around her, Shawn Levy's "Just Married," is so disappointing. Its premise is workable, and its script (by Sam Harper) manages to toss off a few good lines, but it takes a number of awkward running steps at the beginning and then founders irrevocably midway through. Murphy is a rich girl (her parents are David Rasche and Veronica Cartwright, the latter of whom has absolutely nothing to do but does get one of the movie's funniest lines, a gag about her character's ridiculous nickname) who falls for average-joe Kutcher.

It’s not a stripper’s pole, really!

Thu, 12 Sep 2002 16:06:00 +0000

While the rest of us were honoring fallen firemen (and policemen and workaday folks) with a moment of silence this week, Angelina Jolie was apparently taking her firefighter tribute to the next level: She's having a fireman's pole installed in her bedroom.

"I want to slide down a fireman's pole from my bedroom. So it's being put in!" the actress tells Marie Claire magazine.

Sliding down a fire pole, it turns out, is one of the top 10 things Jolie wants to do before she dies.

"Nothing is as sexy as the fire pole will be," she says, though she has no concrete plans for the shiny metal contraption. "I'm sure I'll experiment with it. The bedroom is directly above the kitchen, so if I had a pole ... I just like the idea of going from one room to the other that way."

Stairs are so five minutes ago.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

So is Dick a brad?

"Send the word ... Brad is a dick."

-- Crew members from the film "The Fountain" on Brad Pitt, who deprived them of gainful employment when he backed out of his agreement to make the film two weeks ago, in an open letter to Ain't It Cool News.

Blue Glow

Thu, 18 Oct 2001 16:23:00 +0000

Series

Rachel and Ross reveal what happened that night on Friends (8 p.m., NBC). The reality series Popstars 2 (8 p.m., WB) re-applies the "Popstars" formula, this time to a coed singing group. The thrill is gone, but Survivor: Africa (8 p.m., CBS) remains. CSI (9 p.m., CBS) has a case about the shooting death of a high school jock, seemingly by a tormented classmate. Will takes an acting class on Will & Grace (9 p.m., NBC). Sherry Stringfield rejoins the cast of ER (10 p.m., NBC) as Dr. Susan Lewis, Mark Greene's ex-girlfriend. Frontline (10 p.m., PBS, check local listings) presents "Dangerous Straits," a look at the United States' precarious relationship with China.

Sports

“Girl, Interrupted”

Mon, 20 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

James Mangold's "Girl, Interrupted" would like us to believe that the mentally unstable are different from you and me. They're deeper, wiser and brimming with great truths -- they've just run a little off the rails. Because of their ability to see the truth, they often make excellent writers, and it's their job to reveal never-before-seen angles of reality through their diary entries and trenchant remarks.

That's exactly what Winona Ryder, as 17-year-old Susanna, does in "Girl, Interrupted," a movie about the blurry fringe of insanity that has it all: a hyper-perceptive heroine who probably isn't crazy, just misunderstood; a righteous, knowing and long-suffering nurse with the ability to knock sense into her charges; and a wardful of assorted troubled souls, each with her own special brand of maladjustment. From the first frame, it's easy to see where "Girl, Interrupted" is headed: Someone flew over the cuckoo's nest -- and phoned a movie in somewhere along the way.