WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO Brittany Murphy?

Fifteen years after her shocking death, Us looks back at the star's life and legacy - and delves into the dark mystery that still surrounds her passing

- JOANNA POWELL, Andrea Simpson

ON THE COOL MORNING OF DEC. 20, 2009, actress Brittany Murphy collapsed unconscious in the primary bathroom of her Hollywood Hills home, where she lived with her mother, Sharon Murphy, and husband of two years, Simon Monjack. “My daughter’s passed out,” her mother sobbed in the disturbing 911 call. “She was dizzy, she couldn’t walk right, she’s had a cold.”

Two hours later, the bubbly star with the megawatt smile, beloved for her roles in Clueless, Girl, Interrupted and a string of popular films in the early 2000s, was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was 32 years old.

"I don't think he always had her best interest in mind," director Alex Merkin tells Us of Murphy's husband, Simon Monjack.

As the shocking news spread, so did disbelief. How could a young woman of wealth and means pass away from what the coroner concluded was pneumonia? If Murphy was sick, why didn’t someone take her to the doctor? Speculation swirled: Murphy had overdosed, she’d been poisoned, she died from an eating disorder or toxic mold.

When word got out that Murphy’s husband, a disreputable, 39-year-old British screenwriter and director, refused to allow an autopsy (he was later overruled), suspicions turned on him. “We all were scared and freaked out,” friend and actress Kathy Najimy revealed in the 2021 HBO Max documentary What Happened, Brittany Murphy?

Things got even stranger five months later, when Monjack eerily followed his wife in death — in the same house, of similar causes. Something didn’t feel right.