In 2009, shortly after an ambulance arrived at her Los Angeles home, Brittany Murphy died of what the coroner said was pneumonia. Pneumonia is a serious illness, but it isn’t usually fatal for 32-year-olds, and can often be easily treated at the hospital, so questions have swirled ever since. The upcoming HBO Max documentary What Happened, Brittany Murphy? seeks to figure out just that: What happened? And in the first trailer, the strange behavior of her husband Simon Monjack casts a long shadow.
“Simon took her away,” one interviewee notes in the preview. “He made sure no one could get to her.” We see footage of her life from as early as middle school, and track her progress from someone who was already skinny to a big star who had “lost an inordinate amount of weight.” The trailer implies these weight-based pressures clouded her judgment. “During a little dip she was having, he came along… She became prey.”
Monjack’s strained relationship with the truth is a heavy topic of discussion. “Simon said that he was the largest collector of Vermeer, dated [Australian model] Elle Macpherson and Madonna,” and that he cured his own brain cancer with medicine made from shark fins. “Every single word out of his mouth was a lie.”
Related Video
Monjack died in 2010, also of pneumonia, in the same Los Angeles home where his late wife had collapsed. This leads one woman to wonder, “Is the house cursed?”
What Happened, Brittany Murphy was directed by Cynthia Hill and produced by Blumhouse Television. The two-part series premieres October 14th, and you can check out the trailer below.
