R.I.P. BRITTANY MURPHY

It’s been a while and this is already old news, but I couldn’t let this pass unnoticed: a new name was recently added to the list of late actors/actresses. Brittany Murphy died last December 20th, at the age of 32, of a cardiac arrest caused by an overdose of anxiety pills.

The young actress didn’t have many big titles in her profile, but she acted in a few known Hollywood productions. Some of them are the teen flick Clueless (1995), that launched her to success; the drama Girl, Interrupted (1999); the rap drama 8 Mile (2001); and Just Married (2003), a rom-com with Ashton Kutcher.

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Some of her latest films were Uptown Girls (2003), with Dakota Fanning; Little Black Book (2004), with Ron Livingston; and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005). Brittany did a lot of smaller movies – she had a total of 62 films/TV appearances –, but recently, her career was stumped. Her last completed project was Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, to be released in 2010.

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Shortly before her death, she was fired from the horror production The Caller because of aggressive behavior on set. She also had problems with her another horror flick, Something Wicked: her time on screen was cut short because she seemed confused and couldn’t memorize her lines.

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Brittany’s death resembles to two recent losses: the ‘king of pop’, Michael Jackson (age 50) and Heath Ledger (age 28), one of the cowboys from Brokeback Mountain and the Joker from The Dark Knight. The three of them overdosed from heavy painkillers, and surprised the world with their early passing.

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Another surprising loss last year was actor Patrick Swayze. Suffering from pancreatic cancer, the star of Dirty Dancing (1987) and Ghost (1990) kept acting – even under chemotherapy – and shot a full season of the TV show The Beast, his last work before the early death at the age of 57.

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To all of them... R.I.P.