Biography
Brittany Murphy first came to the attention of film audiences as Tai, one of
Alicia Silverstone's airhead friends, in the 1995 comedy
Clueless. Though convincing as a dim-bulb character, Murphy cuts dramatically against this grain off-camera, as a ferociously intelligent and ambitious young performer who had acting in her blood from early childhood. As a teenager and young adult, she gave expression to the scope of her talent and versatility with a series of engaging film and television roles.
Born in Atlanta on November 10, 1977, Murphy was raised by her single mother in Edison, New Jersey; she later indicated, in interviews, that her mom struggled financially - that they were forced to eat spaghetti night after night, and that on certain occasions, she had to beg her mother to buy clothes at KMart; this would later account for Murphy's marked social investment in homeless causes, as discussed in a February 2003 Glamour article.
A precocious child who began putting on shows when she was a toddler, Murphy was acting in regional theatre productions by the age of nine. Work in various commercials followed, and in 1990 she landed her first television appearance at the age of twelve, on the sitcom
Blossom. She also secured a supporting role as Brenda Drexell, the fourteen-year-old daughter of
Dabney Coleman's fifth grade teacher Otis Drexell, on the (mercifully) short-lived 1991 FOX sitcom Drexell's Class. The following year, Murphy took her first cinematic bow in the dysfunctional family drama
Family Prayers.
Murphy's talent for portraying, dramatically, all degrees on the spectrum of behavioral dysfunction further came to light in three successive projects through 1999: the blackly comic
Reese Witherspoon trailer trash odyssey
Freeway (1996) (as a disfigured lesbian who befriends Witherspoon's Vanessa); a mental patient in Lloyd Kramer's made-for-TV
David and Lisa (1998), and
James Mangold's Girl, Interrupted (1999) (as yet another resident at a mental institution).
Meanwhile, on a less ambitious (albeit more whimsical) note, Murphy also became a fixtureon
King of the Hill,
Mike Judge's long-running contemporary cartoon of suburban life in the southern U.S., as Luanne Platter, the hair stylist niece who comes to live with Hank Hill's family. Murphy kept a full plate as the millennium wrapped. In addition to her work for Mangold in 1999,
she also explored the collective insanity of the beauty pageant world in
Drop Dead Gorgeous, while on the small screen, she covered much darker thematic ground with the well-received Holocaust drama
The Devil's Arithmetic (also 1999). In 2001, Murphy appeared in the
Michael Douglas thriller
Don't Say a Word, and alongside
Drew Barrymore in
Riding in Cars With Boys.
Cast opposite
Eminem in director
Curtis Hanson's 2002 drama
8 Mile, Murphy performed compellingly as an aspiring rap star's unapologetic muse; in 2004, Murphy headlined Nick Hurran's thoroughly disappointing rom-com
Little Black Book. She also made a splash in
Robert Rodriguez's innovative graphic novel adaptation
Sin City, as the arrogant waitress who becomes the prize in a heated rivalry between
Benicio Del Toro and
Clive Owen.
Murphy made appearances in four features in 2006. In Alex Keshishian's progressive romantic comedy
Love and Other Disasters, she played a London-based American expatriate, employed at Vogue, who tries to fix up her gay roommate; in Ed Burns's sixth directorial outing, the
Big Chill-like romantic comedy
The Groomsmen, she played the expectant girlfriend of Burns's Paulie. She also portrayed a member of the ensemble in
Karen Moncrieff's murder mystery
The Dead Girl, about a group of seemingly disconnected individuals whose lives intersect as a girl's murderer comes to light, and one of the lead voices in George "Babe" Miller's
Happy Feet, an animated penguin tale.
Murphy's appearance alongside
Ashton Kutcher in
Just Married was - to some degree - a case of art imitating life: offscreen, Murphy and Kutcher began to date as well (and became a hot tabloid item), though unlike their onscreen counterparts, they never wed. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide