In Memoriam: Brittany Murphy

I always felt a kind of… bond with Brittany Murphy. Sure, she was really cute and everything. But even though it sounds silly, I always thought it was kind of neat that we were both born the same hospital, albeit six years apart.

Murphy’s rise to fame started with her appearance in Clueless in 1995. I loved her in the criminally underrated 1996 film Freeway was Reese Witherspoon and Keifer Sutherland. Roles in Drop Dead Gorgeous and Girl, Interrupted (both 1999) led to her first major starring role in Don’t Say a Word (2001), a thriller with Michael Douglas. This led to her role in 8 Mile, which made her a bona fide movie star. She appeared in many films since then including Just Married, Uptown Girls, Sin City, The Groomsmen, Love and Other Disasters, Happy Feet, and The Ramen Girl.

Murphy also had aspirations of being a pop singer. In 2006 she released the single “Faster Kill Pussycat” with British DJ Paul Oakenfold. The tune hit #1 on the Billboard dance chart in the US, and #7 on the UK singles charts. She also sang two songs on the Happy Feet soundtrack. For the past couple of years, Murphy’s Wikipedia page mentioned that she was working on an album of her own, although that was edited out of the page in the months before she died.

The one thing I’ll really remember Brittany Murphy for was her longtime role as Luanne Platter on the animated series King of the Hill. Some folks seemed surprised that it was Murphy’s voice on the show. I think it was unmistakably her.

It might seem crass, but I wanted to post a few pictures of her. She really was quite pretty, don’t you think?

Here’s her music video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3Z__7ItJY