Brittany Murphy

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...