![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/02\/bombshell.jpg\" "\\"bombshell\\"")
<\/a>Photo by James Devaney, 2006<\/p><\/div>\n
Those big eyes. Those pouting lips.\u00a0At 5’3″ (officially, but that’s a stretch, so to speak), 34-24-35, she was a tiny bombshell. I wanted\u00a0to get that out there first, so the rest of this won’t be dismissed with, “he just thought she was hot.” I did think she was hot, and I wasn’t the only one: She was #8 on Maxim magazine’s Hot 100 of 2005 list. #7 was Angelina Jolie. ’nuff said.\u00a0Let’s move on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I bumped into her once, almost literally. We were both getting off an airplane in LA. I was waiting to step into the aisle, and she was walking up the aisle, behind me, also in coach. She and I looked at each other. Looked away. Did a double take. Looked away again. I thought about what to say. Maybe that I loved the scene in “Clueless<\/a>” where she bangs her head on the table, distraught over a guy who didn’t know she existed, wailing, “This was our song!” Maybe that I was honored to be travelling with her on her very last trip in coach. Maybe ask if she ordered the chicken. But in a long line of encounters with female celebrities, I choked, big time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perhaps because of this close encounter,\u00a0along with her height–so close to my own–and the men she dated,\u00a0I thought of her as accessible. Particularly\u00a0before David Spade’s game-changing relationship with Heather Locklear,\u00a0I saw her as one of the few\u00a0starlets a “guy like me” actually (OK, hypothetically) had a shot with. And this made her feel much more real.\u00a0<\/p>\n A few days after her death I\u00a0watched “Deadline<\/a>,” one of her final movies, released in 2009.\u00a0This movie suuuuucked. The script was non-existent. It was like she was just put in a moderately spooky house and told to wing it.\u00a0And there she was, soaking in a tub. Brittany Murphy. In a tub. And all I could think was how much she now\u00a0looked like Jake Gyllenhall. I’m a big Jake Gyllenhall fan, but not in a watch-him-in-a-bathtub kind of way. Brittany looked frail and worn. Not quite haggard, but gaunt. Like she was close to death. I just couldn’t watch her like that. After 30 minutes I turned it off. I preferred to remember her in her prime. But even in her prime it was not uplifting to watch Murphy on screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Daisy in "Girl, Interrupted"<\/p><\/div>\n In 1999\u00a0Murphy played\u00a0\u00a0Daisy in “Girl, Interrupted<\/a>,” a role\u00a0that earned her a Young Artist Award nomination for “Best Performance in a Feature Film – Leading Young Actress” nomination. There’s a particularly brutal scene in the movie\u00a0where her character is visited at her home by Angelina Jolie’s\u00a0character, Lisa. Daisy is bustling around the house in her bathrobe.\u00a0In the face of Jolie’s antagonism Daisy bravely squares off and tells her, “You’re just jealous, Lisa, because\u00a0I got better. Because I was released. Because I have a chance… at a life!” But it takes less than two minutes\u00a0for the juggernaut of Lisa’s cold, calculated analysis and accusations to melt her resolve.\u00a0In the morning, Daisy is found dead, hanging from her curtain rod. And Lisa steals money from the pocket of the bathrobe she is still wearing.<\/p>\n "Please, why can't you just let me die?" With Christopher Walken in "The Prophecy II"<\/p><\/div>\n Brittany Murphy was not a character actor; in every film I saw she basically presented the same personality, the same psyche,\u00a0and\u00a0so we come to identify this as “the real” Brittany Murphy. I could be wrong. She was in 63 movies and television shows, and I only saw a dozen of them. Maybe it’s because I loved “Sin City<\/a>” and “The Prophecy II<\/a>,” but avoided\u00a0“Just Married<\/a>” like the plague.\u00a0I mean it was awfully nice what Ashton Kutcher tweeted after her death, but really.\u00a0I did see “Happy Feet<\/a>.”\u00a0Her feet may have been happy, but it’s like a smile that doesn’t extend to the eyes,\u00a0and she wasn’t asked to reprise that role.\u00a0<\/p>\n I refuse\u00a0to refer to her “untimely” death. When it’s your time, it’s your time, even if you’re\u00a0way too young to die of a heart attack. I was\u00a0shocked\u00a0by her death, at age 32, but\u00a0I wasn’t actually surprised. I felt like we all should have seen it coming. Indeed, like we all did<\/em> see it coming, watched it coming, time and again. And we let her die, one last time.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>