- Peter Bradshaw
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 00.23 GMT
Towards the end of last week, as a kind of by-product of talking about the top films of the noughties, added colleagues and I found ourselves talking about those Hollywood actors who were big or biggish at the beginning of the decade, but of whom we suddenly realise we had heard not quite in the way that much.
One of these, grimly, was Brittany Murphy, who has died of a heart attack at her Los Angeles home at the age of 32. Thanks to what appear to have existence its hyper-alert network of informants among the emergency services, TMZ.com got the story first.
Murphy had in fact been working steadily despite a credit for being difficult and having left a production due to “creative differences”. Recently, behind a whirlwind fable, she married the British-born producer and screenwriter Simon Monjack, from whom she appeared to be favored with piked up something of a British accent.
Her death may not get the column inches achieved by Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger, but there was something about it which for me was unspeakably sad, mainly inasmuch as I still associate Murphy by her breakthrough film, Amy Heckerling’s sublime 1995 comedy Clueless, in which the 18-year-old Murphy played high-schooler Tai, a naïve suburbanite newcomer capriciously taken up as a “project” by super-cool Cher, played by Alicia Silverstone.
Murphy was absolutely sound in the role: wide-eyed, immensely likeable, funny and yet shrewd – and she complimented Silverstone’s deceptively airhead style tremendously. Arguably, neither woman build roles as great as those ever again, although Murphy was in the charming Sidewalks Of New York and played opposite Eminem in 8 Mile. She was also in the creepy thriller Don’t Say A Word with Michael Douglas, although that was, perhaps, the amiable of infantilised part which might have achieved her grownup course of conduct more harm than good. She was a brilliant vicinity in Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City in 2005.
Rightly or wrongly, I will always associate Brittany Murphy with Clueless – a lovely, sparky performance in the greatest of the teen movies. As time went on, someone might be favored with offered her a role that would have been of equal quality. But now that be possible to never be. I’m afraid that 2009 is ending on a sad note.
