Brittany Murphy was the tragically young age of 32 when she died suddenly 10 years ago.
Her life had taken some surprising turns in the years since she first caught most moviegoers' eyes in Clueless as the new girl in school who gets a crash course in popularity from Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash, but both busy with work and thinking about starting a family, she seemed happy.
On Dec. 1, 2009, she attended the premiere of the bare-bones noir thriller Across the Hall, in which she played a woman who's cheating on her fiancé with his best friend and some intense cat-and-mouse ensues. "I don't know June's actual reasons for cheating," she said in an interview with Maximo TV, laughing. "I'm very different from June—very, very different."
Two days later at a pop-up shop opening in L.A., which turned out to be her final public appearance, she was asked about her plans for 2010. Murphy told Access Hollywood, "As far as having a New Year's resolution, I'd love to have a child next year. "But that's kind of a big one!"
Though some of her later work wasn't widely seen, Murphy left behind a wide variety of performances, mingling contemporary classics like Clueless and 8 Mile and her decade-long job as the voice of Luanne on King of the Hill with romantic comedies, family fare and some much darker stories.
At the 1999 premiere of Girl, Interrupted, in which her troubled character commits suicide, Murphy said that playing such a complex, self-destructive person wasn't "a matter of difficult, hard or easy...It's just challenging or not challenging, or creatively rewarding or not—and it was creatively rewarding, and I really enjoyed doing this film very much."
Brian To/FilmMagic
Her approach to how she picked her projects didn't seem to change for the rest of her life.
"For me, I've had the good fortune of being able to play characters that are stuck in the middle of comedic situations, comedic stories, just ridiculous—or tragic," she said 10 years later at the Across the Hall premiere. "It all has to do with a story and the director, and that's really where the decisions are made on my behalf."
Obviously we wish there had been many more decisions ahead.
Brittany Murphy was gone too soon, but we can at least remember everything she did while she was here. Take a look at her biggest roles: