‘What Happened, Brittany Murphy?’: 8 Bombshells From New Documentary

In the wake of the #FreeBritney movement and the reassessment of previously reviled cultural figures like Paris Hilton, there has been a full reckoning with the toxicity of early-aughts media and culture — how we publicly policed young female stars’ bodies and life choices, clucking our tongues with faux concern while at the same time using our talons to rip them apart. The latest famous figure to be reconsidered in this new light is also one of the most tragic: Brittany Murphy, the prodigiously talented breakout star of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, who was swallowed up by the early-2000s tabloid-industrial complex and then died of pneumonia and anemia at her Hollywood home in 2009, at the age of 32.

At the time of her death, Murphy was on a career backslide, appearing almost exclusively in slashers and straight-to-video features. But just a few years earlier she’d been an It Girl, co-starring in hugely successful films such as Girl, Interrupted; 8 Mile; Just Married; and Uptown Girls, and dating co-stars like Eminem and Ashton Kutcher. Her precipitous downfall is the focus of What Happened, Brittany Murphy?, a two-part HBO Max documentary which traces her early successes, self-esteem struggles, and sudden, puzzling death. The mystery surrounding Murphy’s passing deepened further when her husband, Simon Monjack, a third-tier Hollywood screenwriter, died of similar causes less than six months later.

What Happened, Brittany Murphy? presents a fairly straightforward narrative (though, produced by the horror juggernaut Blumhouse, it injects the opening and closing moments with a spooky flair). The film chronicles the upward trajectory of Murphy, an irrepressible little girl raised by a single mother, Sharon Murphy, in New Jersey, with big dreams of one day becoming a famous actor. Mother and daughter moved to Hollywood when Brittany was a preteen, and she quickly began booking small roles in sitcoms like Sister, Sister, The Torkelsons spinoff Almost Home, and Boy Meets World before making her film debut as the ungainly yet lovable Tai in 1995’s Clueless. But insecurity set in fast. After receiving merciless feedback from producers and agents, Brittany gave herself an extreme makeover, dying her hair blonde and shedding a dramatic amount of weight from her already petite frame.

Soon, she started to land leading-lady roles, while becoming a tabloid mainstay during her relationship with Kutcher. But not long after their split, her career went into a tailspin, with Brittany booking fewer and fewer high-profile roles amid rumors of drug use and erratic behavior on set, until her untimely death.

It wasn’t until after her passing that the public realized Brittany had fallen into the grip of her Svengali husband, a British screenwriter and aspiring filmmaker who turned out to be little more than a con man. But hindsight gives the film a clear perspective: Monjack, while an insidious force in his wife’s life, was far from the only one to blame for her death. What Happened, Brittany Murphy? also casts its lens on the culture at large, revealing how Hollywood, the media, and the public were complicit in another promising young…