Is Brittany Murphy A Junior Michael Jackson?

Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Brittany Murphy.

If you were handicapping that celebrity death pool trifecta, you sure wouldn’t have picked Murphy to finish first (literally).

Actress Brittany Murphy’s mother reportedly found her unconscious in the shower of her Los Angeles home early Sunday, Dec. 20.

According to the official timeline, paramedics arrived on the scene at approximately 8 a.m., performed CPR, and transferred Murphy to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where she was official pronounced dead at 10:04 a.m.

Preliminary cause of death? Cardiac arrest.

Not unsurprisingly that was listed as the initial cause of death for Michael Jackson, who was later determined to have died as a result of massive drug misuse and physical debilitation. Charges have been laid against several people in the case.

Now Brittany Murphy is no Michael Jackson. Murphy, 32 when she died, first hit the spotlight as a gawky teen sidekick in 1995’s Clueless.

Over the next decade or so she morphed into a Hollywood hottie, appearing in movies like Girl Interrupted, 8 Mile, Uptown Girls, Sin City, Little Black Book and Don’t Say a Word.

For me her classic role was always as Hank Hill’s niece Luanne in the animated TV series King of the Hill. Murphy played Luanne Platter and a few other characters in 226 episodes of King of the Hill between its premiere in 1997 and her death on Sunday.

On the animated front, she was also Gloria the penguin in Happy Feet.

But apart from the wholesomeness of appearing in family cartoons, Murphy carried celebrity bad-girl baggage that was at least as heavy as Britney Spears’ and Lindsay Lohan’s.

Here’s a gossip item from the New York Daily News way back in early 2005 (March 17, 2005, to be exact):

Brittany Murphy is snorting at rumors that she owes her weight loss to cocaine.

"I have never tried it in my entire life," the "8 Mile" actress insists. "I've never even seen it. ... I am also way too high-strung. I can't even take a Sudafed. Can you imagine? My God. I think my heart would explode."

Dismissing talk that she's had plastic surgery since her star turn in 1995's "Clueless," she tells Jane magazine: "I have broken my nose three times. But I've never gotten it fixed. I know that changed the shape of it, but it made it wider."

Having had a bad breakup with her "Just Married" co-star, Ashton Kutcher, she's now seeing a guy she met when he hung her Christmas lights in 2003.

"He's just a normal guy from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn," she says. "I'm elated. ... It's really neat that we've managed to be together for months now, dodging the press. He hung our lights again this year, but I didn't have to pay for it."

That romance, like most of Britanny’s, didn’t work out. She’s been married for thye last couple of years to British writer Simon Monjack, who has problems of his own (apart from now being a widower). Just last month, paramedics were called to meet a plane landing at LAX with an incoherent Monjack aboard. He was hospitalized overnight.

Brittany herself was fired last month from her latest movie, being shot in Puerto Rico.

Her extremely thin appearance at the recent premiere of the movie Across The Hall started speculation again that Brittany had a serious eating disorder.

Rumors of Murphy’s drug addiction have swirled for years, sometimes fuelled by incidents involving police at Murphy’s home and sometimes by public displays of bizarre behaviour.

So you’ve got all the classic elements of the Michael Jackson cocktail: probable drug abuse, suspected eating disorder, (plastic surgery? Who knows what impact that plays.), enablers in the immediate vicinity, and finally cardiac arrest — a body’s final, ultimate protest against the wrongs heaped upon it by its owner.

Goodbye, Luanne. I’m not sure there was ever going to be any other ending. As with most things, timing was the big surprise.

By Alan Parker for Toronto News 24