Brittany Murphy

Actress Brittany Murphy has died. Twitter pretty much exploded with the news, while I, only having access to Twitter at the time, was forced to ask myself, "Who is Brittany Murphy?" I'm terrible at recognizing actresses and actors. Whenever my wife and I watch a movie with a number of characters in it, I separate the actors into two groups: the ones I know, and the others. For example, Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibilty" stars Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, and a bunch of people who are not Grant, Thompson, or Rickman.

So I had to come home and look up Ms. Murphy, and it turns out the only projects of hers I have seen are Fox' "King of the Hill" and the film "Clueless". I saw Clueless, but this is the only part of Clueless I can remember:





Which I love for the line, "Girlie, I'm the Messiah of the DMV." And she's not in that scene. Ms. Murphy was 32, and there is tons of speculation that her death involved drugs or anorexia, which is sensible at least as far as it is rare for 32 year old people to suddenly suffer cardiac arrest. It doesn't, in the end, matter what killed her because she's gone. Dying young, though, she may get a Heath Ledger/Marilyn Monroe sort of halo effect, making the work she did better than it was because she'll never get the chance to turn 46 and play the mom on a sitcom about two wacky teenage twins.It's a shame that she's gone, though, because people will miss her. Eventually, she will be only the sum of her work, the series of characters she played and the impression she made on audiences. Which is too bad, but it sure beats not being remembered at all.