12/20/09

The first time I saw Brittany Murphy as an adult (IMDB tells me she was a regular on the short-lived sitcom Drexel's Class as a kid) was in a 1996 episode of Nash Bridges called "Night Train".  "Adult" being a relative term, as she was only 19 at the time, but you'd have never known it.  In a role similar to the one John Travolta played in The Taking of Pelham 123, she dominated the hour with the screen presence of a veteran star.  This was a character I hadn't seen before, a young woman with the explosive, violent rage of a hardened con, and I knew that this was an actress to watch.  The impression was cemented two years later in a Direct-to-Video sequel called The Prophecy II, filled with name actors who couldn't get a better gig at the time.  She played Izzy, a screwed-up girl who joined her boyfriend in a suicide pact but found herself unable to die because Archangel Gabriel (Christopher Walken) kept her alive to serve as his assistant in a world full of strange customs and technologies he didn't understand.  Suicidal yet cocky, torn between a desire to have everything just be over and a chance to upset Gabriel's diabolical apple cart, it was a great character and she played it to the hilt, holding the screen opposite the Oscar-winner Walken like the pro she always was.

Her career was starting to pick up steam, having been seen in the ensembles of Clueless and Girl, Interrupted, and in 2001 came her first leading role in a Hollywood movie, starring opposite Michael Douglas in Don't Say a Word.  It would be her best performance, as a psychiatric patient hiding a secret criminals led by Sean Bean were desperate to know.  Her tortured sing-song "I'll never te-ell" was the center of the ad campaign and became a catchphrase for a time:  never again would a character so perfectly play off the vulnerability and oddness she could effortlessly inject into a role.  

But Hollywood never really knew what to do with Brittany Murphy.  She was certainly beautiful, and oozed tough-girl sex appeal, but at heart she was a character actress, more like Walken than Sandra Bullock, and when she found herself cast in assembly line romantic comedies like Just Married and Little Black Book, her career never really recovered.  One mid-90's bright spot was a stolen scene in the middle of Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, a noir horror show perfectly suited to what she did best.  And her deceptively sweet voice (heard in every episode of Mike Judge's King of the Hill, on which she spent almost her entire adult life) shined as the female lead in George Miller's Oscar-winning penguin musical Happy Feet (in which she did her own very impressive singing).

The last time I saw her (it's still unknown if her role in Sylvester Stallone's 2010 action epic The Expendables will make the cut), her career had come full-circle and she was back in a Direct-to-Video sci-fi flick called MegaFault.  She didn't look well and was horribly miscast as the head of FEMA, but like Prophecy II co-stars Walken and Eric Roberts, this was a woman who didn't know how to give less than 100%, and her scenes with co-star Eric La Salle had surprising emotional resonance even as a giant crack was splitting the world in two around them.

As long-time readers know, I'm a frustrated screenwriter in addition to self-proclaimed movie critic, and in 2000, I wrote a script that's come close to being green-lit a few times over the past decade.  The Role to Have in it was written specifically for pre-stardom Brittany Murphy, so while we never met, the loss of all the roles she'll never play is particularly acute to me.  She died this morning still about a decade away from what should have been her prime, when that psycho outdueled by Nash Bridges only because it was his show could really have come out to play in roles as ruthless authority figures, creepy mothers and the like.  A fire burned inside Brittany Murphy, and before it was extinguished, she used it to craft a handful of truly memorable performances.  She will be missed.