The woman sobs, saying “My daughter’s passed out.”
“Brittany, please come back!” she is heard screaming.
When the ambulance arrived at the $5.3 million house in the Hollywood Hills, they found actress Brittany Murphy unresponsive and by the time they reached the hospital, she was pronounced dead.
She was only 32 years old.
Tragically, young deaths are a Hollywood trope but there has arguably never been one as bizarre as Murphy’s, which would see her husband die in the same house, in exactly the same circumstances only five months later, with allegations of rat poison, murder and a disturbing love triangle.
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Success, fame, plaudits: In 2003, actress Murphy had it all. She had just got her first lead in a rom-com and was dating up-and-comer Ashton Kutcher.
Brittany Murphy: Gone Before Her Time, streaming now on Tubi, yet somehow, tells the story of how it all went so very wrong and the theories that still haunt her story.
Her big break had come in 1995 when director Amy Heckerling cast Murphy in Clueless. Murphy’s Tai made her a breakout star which was soon followed by critically acclaimed roles in Girl, Interrupted and 8 Mile.
“She was really at the core … vulnerable, but brave enough to show that vulnerability on camera and that takes courage” her Clueless co-star Stacey Dash says in the documentary.
However this was the early 2000s, the peak of the paparazzi feeding frenzy, that would see packs of (nearly all) men essentially hunt young stars. For the tabloids, TMZ and celebrity bloggers like Perez Hilton, nothing sold better than covering Hollywood’s hot messes. Murphy, along with Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, found herself suffering through intense scrutiny, not least because she failed to fit the size zero, blonde template.
To understand the climate, in 2003 Kutcher appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show and laughed when Stern made this comment about the young actress: “Can you believe she was the ugly chick in Clueless? She was a fat ugly chick. She transformed herself.”
That relationship ended, followed by two speedy engagements, then breakups. Murphy was also supporting her mum Sharon, who had raised her singlehandedly, as she fought breast cancer. Soon, people were noticing the actress was visibly much slimmer.
Then in 2006,Murphy went for a meeting with a British man, Simon Monjack, 36, who was listed as a screenwriter of that year’s acclaimed film Factory Girl (it would later emerge that he had only received the credit after suing).
Murphy was every sort of smitten with the older,charismatic man however the truth was something far more sinister and as investigative journalist Mark Ebner says, Monjack “was a liar, a cheat, a thief, a sociopath, a con artist and a narcissist all wrapped into one. This guy was a monster.”
Those in Murphy’s inner circle were deeply concerned about the romance.
“One of Brittany’s best girlfriends had some conversations with her and they were really very concerned for her when she decided to marry Simon,” publicist Roger Neal says in the Tubi documentary. “Her reps at the time, they did an intervention at the house and tried to get her to call off the wedding.”
They failed to get through to her and in 2007 Murphy and Monjack wed – but the marriage “marked a rather significant withdrawal from public life for Brittany,” entertainment journalist Brian Balthazar says in the doco.
Soon reports started to come out that she was letting her team members go.
“Simon had become everything to her, husband, manager, makeup artist, hair stylists, wardrobe stylist, everything,” Neal says.
In an unusual arrangement, while Murphy and Monjack lived in her Hollywood home, her mother Sharon lived with them too.
The narrative about Murphy had changed, from a rising talent to a reputation for being unreliable and hard to work with.
In 2009, director Alex Merkin cast her in Across the Hall and he tells the Tubi doco of his lead, “There was something that felt almost cult-like in her relationship” with Monjack. When Merkin asked for her contact number, Murphy gave him Monjack’s; she no longer had her own or her own email address.
When production began, Monjack’s presence on set “was causing problems for us,” Merkin says, leaving him “at my breaking point.” It was only when Monjack heard Merkin discuss replacing her that things calmed down.
A part in the low budget horror flick The Caller would be Murphy’s last role, with the film shoot in Puerto Rico proving disastrous. Only two days into the shoot, she was replaced and Murphy, along with Monjack and Sharon, decided to stay on the Caribbean island. And then it started raining.
Her husband and mum both got staphylococcus, Neal says, followed by Murphy. Once back in LA, they started to get better – but she did not.
The actress, according to Gone Before Her Time, would spend hours in the bathroom and it started to appear that something was seriously wrong with her health.
According to investigative journalist Ebner, “Brittany was actually articulating to Simon’s mother in the UK, saying to her, ‘I’m not well. I think, ‘am I dying?’
“Simon’s mother told Brittany to get medical attention. They finally relented and made an appointment with a doctor but it was too little too late.”
On December 20 she collapsed and soon died.
Murphy’s official cause of death was later found to be pneumonia and anaemia.
The immediate question became, as former People journalist Sarah Hammel tells the documentary, “how does a 32-year-old with money and health insurance, who lives how many miles from Cedars-Sinai, one of the best hospitals on the planet, die of pneumonia?”
Almost immediately the internet cast suspicion on the controlling, toxic Monjack and it would later be found that they had 90 different sorts of prescription drugs. “That 10,000 square foot house might as well have been a pharmacy,” Ebner says.
Bizarrely, five months later, Monjack would die in eerily identical circumstances, collapsing at home with a frantic Sharon calling 911.
Hammel, who had been working on a story about Monjack for months says, “To have him die as well, then you really start thinking, what happened in that house?”
After his death, Sharon found out that he had spent more than $4 million of Murphy’s money on fake jewellery, false investments, and non-existent real estate deals.
Soon, conspiracy theories started flying. One was that mould, that had spread throughout their Hollywood home, had killed them. However, while their symptoms matched with this, the medical examiner “didn’t see any evidence of mould in her lungs or any other organs,” according to Entertainment Tonight.
In 2013, Murphy’s estranged father, Angelo Bertolotti pushed to have her death re-evaluated and claimed testing had found rat poison in a hair sample. He told Good Morning America, “I have a feeling that there was definitely a murder situation here. Yeah, it’s poison.” However, the chemicals were ones also found in hair products and credible toxicologists refuted the finding.
Sharon strongly rejected Angelo’s claims in an open letter in The Hollywood Reporter.
Even now on the internet, theories still swirl about sinister forces being at play; however as former People reporter Hammel says, “Ultimately it does seem like she died of neglect. Had she gone to the hospital, had she understood she needed help, she would be alive today.
“There was no urgency in that house … no one was taking care of her and she wasn’t taking care of herself.
“Simon Monjack did a lot of damage in his life.”
Brittany Murphy: Gone Before Her Time is currently streaming on Tubi for free