R.I.P. Brittany Murphy

Actress Brittany Murphy died Sunday morning in Los Angeles, California of 'cardiac arrest', but no one is clear why. Most suspect drug abuse. The 32-year-old star of horror films like Dead Line, Something Wicked, and the low-budget Aslum disaster flick Megafault was found unconscious in the shower by her mother.

No one can deny that since her 1995 role as a cute brunette in the teen comedy Clueless, her appearance drastically changed to a stick-thin blond with a vacant stare...

"She seemed to go through a change on Clueless," Clueless director Amy Heckerling told And the Winner Is... on Sunday. "Maybe she felt like she was not the, like, skinny, pretty girl, you know? And then the next few movies she was, you know, thinner, blonde ... and going out with Ashton Kutcher suddenly got more into that whole glamorous scene. I think she felt the pressure to become a different sort of commodity to survive in show business, and I think it was awful."

However, her career skyrocketed with major roles in movies like 8 Mile and Don't Say A Word. Then, around 2005, it took a major downturn, and none of her fans knew why. The last few years, Murphy was relegated to playing cliche scientist roles in ghost stories and b-movies, all the while bein steered by new husband Simon Monjack, who just a few weeks before her death had been arrested at Los Angeles International Airport for drug posession. Monjack and Murphy were on their way home from the set of The Caller, a new horror film Murphy had just been fired from.(Murphy's rep has denied that she was fired.) However, Murphy was immediately replaced by Rachel LaFevre and shooting went on as scheduled.

Someone who worked with Murphy recently on the Darin Scott horror film Something Wicked, shot in Oregon, told The Wrap that Murphy was barely able to shoot her scenes and would lose her focus in mid-sentence during a take.

“Her husband was her handler, he shuttled her around. She was barely there,” said an individual with knowledge of the production, referring to Murphy’s husband and manager, Simon Monjack. “She’d go in and out of consciousness in the middle of takes.”

The individual said Murphy’s inability to stay fully conscious caused producers to rewrite her character, a therapist to the two main characters, and her scenes. He said colleagues on the set had presumed she used prescription drugs.

Back in 2005, Murphy publicly denied rumors of cocaine use, saying, "Just for the record I have never tried it in my entire life, I've never even seen it, and I don't leave the house too much, except to go to work."

Another tragic loss in Hollywood of a beautiful young woman. So sorry, Brittany.