Brittany Murphy (November 10, 1977 – December 20, 2009) was an American actress and singer.
She starred in films such as Clueless, Girl, Interrupted, 8 Mile, Sin City and Riding in Cars with Boys, and performed vocals on a range of films and with dance musician Paul Oakenfold, together garnering a number one dance music hit in the United States in 2006.
Brittany Murphy was born in Atlanta, Georgia on November 10, 1977. Her parents, Sharon Murphy and Angelo Bertolotti, divorced when she was two years old, and Murphy was raised by her mother, in Edison, New Jersey, and later in Los Angeles,[where they moved so Murphy could pursue an acting career. Murphy said her mother never tried to stifle her creativity, and she considered her mother a crucial factor in her later success: "When I asked my mom to move to California, she sold everything and move out here for me. ... She always believed in me." Murphy's mother is of Irish and Eastern European descent and her father is Italian American. She was raised a Baptist and later became a non-denominational Christian.
Murphy landed her first job in Hollywood when she was age 14, starring as Brenda Drexell in the series Drexell's Class. She then went on to play Molly Morgan in the short-lived The Torkelsons spinoff Almost Home. Murphy also guest-starred on several television series including Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Blossom, and Frasier. She also had recurring roles on Sister, Sister; Party of Five; and Boy Meets World. In 1997, she began voicing the character of Luanne Platter (as well as the younger version of Joseph Gribble) on the long-running animated series King of the Hill.
Murphy starred in many successful films, including Clueless (1995); Girl, Interrupted (1999); Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999); Don't Say a Word (2001); the TV adaption of the novel The Devil's Arithmetic (2001); 8 Mile (2002) and Uptown Girls (2003) as well as many lesser-known films, such as Spun (2003). In 2004, she starred in the romantic comedy Little Black Book, and the critically acclaimed Sin City (2005). She starred in two Edward Burns films: Sidewalks of New York (2002) and The Groomsmen (2006). In 2009, she was cast in the Lifetime TV movie, Tribute, as the main character, Cilla. She was set to appear in the Sylvester Stallone film, The Expendables, which will be released in 2010.
On June 6, 2006, Murphy and Paul Oakenfold released the single "Faster Kill Pussycat", from the album A Lively Mind. The song became a club hit, and hit number one on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play chart. It also hit number seven in the UK singles chart in June 2006.
She dabbled in music again with the release of the film Happy Feet, in which she covered Queen's "Somebody to Love" and Earth, Wind & Fire's "Boogie Wonderland".
In late 2002, Murphy began dating Ashton Kutcher, her co-star in Just Married. Once engaged to talent manager Jeff Kwatinetz, Murphy became engaged to Joe Macaluso in December 2005, a production assistant she met while working on the film Little Black Book. In August 2006, they ended their engagement. In May 2007, Murphy married British screenwriter Simon Monjack in a private Jewish ceremony.
In 2005, Murphy signed as the spokesmodel for Jordache jeans. In 2006, Murphy was voted 36th in FHM's 100 Sexiest Women List, and in May of the same year, Maxim named Murphy #49 on its annual Hot 100 List.
At 8 a.m. on December 20, 2009, the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to "a medical request" at the Los Angeles home Murphy and Monjack shared. She had apparently collapsed in a bathroom. Firefighters attempted to resuscitate Murphy on the scene and she was subsequently transported to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead on arrival at 10:04 a.m. after going into cardiac arrest.
-- wiki
The Dead Girl is a 2006 film written and directed by Karen Moncrieff starring Toni Collette, Brittany Murphy and Marcia Gay Harden. The film was nominated for several 2007 Independent Spirit Awards awards including Best Feature and Best Director. The story revolves around the death of a young woman (played by Murphy) and the characters linked to her murder.
Daniel Thomas O'Bannon (September 30, 1946 – December 17, 2009) was a motion picture screenwriter, director and occasional actor, usually in the science fiction and horror genres.When O'Bannon was in USC, he met John Carpenter and they collaborated on the 45-minute USC School of Cinema-Television short Dark Star (1970). Carpenter expanded the short into a feature which was released in 1974 with a final budget of only US$60,000. O'Bannon was along, serving in a number of capacities, including scripting, editing and acting as one of the leading roles (Pinback). In 1975 Dark Star won the Golden Scroll award (as the Saturn Awards were known in the early years) for Best Special Effects.O'Bannon, growing up a sci-fi and horror enthusiast, had abandoned technical work (including a stint as a computer animator on George Lucas' classic Star Wars) for screenwriting. Following Star Wars he was attached to supervise special effects for a Alejandro Jodorowsky production of Frank Herbert's Dune but this fell apart in 1975 leaving O'Bannon homeless and with no money. Together with Ronald Shusett, he wrote the original story for Alien (1979), regathered the artistic talent from the defunct Dune project and is generally acknowledged (along with H. R. Giger and Ridley Scott) as being one of the main creative forces behind Alien's success.O'Bannon has voiced his displeasure with his next big-budget outing, John Badham's Blue Thunder (1983), an action yarn about a Los Angeles helicopter surveillance team. Originally written with Don Jakoby, Blue Thunder also underwent extensive rewriting, losing some of its political content. He and Jakoby also scripted Lifeforce (1985); a tale directed by Tobe Hooper, that veers from alien visitation to vampirism to an apocalyptic ending. It was not well-received and was considered a box office flop. O'Bannon would again collaborate with Jakoby and Hooper for the 1986 remake Invaders from Mars. Purists considered it inferior to the 1950s original and it also performed poorly at the box office.Also in 1985, O'Bannon moved into the director's chair with Return of the Living Dead. The film met with success and went on to spawn numerous sequels, not unlike the earlier Alien.He and Shusett would reteam on Total Recall (1990), an adaptation of the classic Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale". This was a project the two had been working on since collaborating on Alien. The film went on to earn well over US$100 million. An earlier screenplay by the duo titled Hemoglobin was also produced as the low budget feature Bleeders (1997).His second directorial feature, The Resurrected (1992), was a low budget horror effort that was released directly on video and focused on a family's ancient rituals which awaken the dead. It was based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.O'Bannon also received a co-writing credit on the film Screamers (1995), a science fiction film about post-apocalyptic robots programmed to kill. Adapted from the Philip K. Dick story "Second Variety", O'Bannon did his work on the screenplay in the early 1980s.1974 Dark Star – writer, special effects, editor, production design, co-star 1977 Star Wars – special computer effects 1979 Alien – writer 1981 Dead & Buried – writer 1981 Heavy Metal – writer of two segments, Soft Landing and B-17 1983 Blue Thunder – writer 1985 Lifeforce – writer 1985 The Return of the Living Dead – writer, director, voice 1986 Invaders from Mars – writer 1990 Total Recall – writer 1992 The Resurrected – director 1995 Screamers – writer 2010 Silvaticus 3015 – co-screenplay writer
O'Bannon is the writer of the influential story "The Long Tomorrow", illustrated by Jean Giraud. This particular piece is the main graphical influence on Blade Runner.
At the time of his death, O’Bannon was working on a prequel to “Alien” to be released in 2011.
He was married to Diane Louise Lindley from January 18, 1986 until his death in Los Angeles on December 17, 2009. He is survived by their son Adam.
Friedrich "Fritz" Christian Anton Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-German-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and M, made before he moved to the United States, where he contributed greatly to film noir.
Friedrich "Fritz" Lang was born in Vienna on December 5, 1890, in what was then Austria-Hungary, to Anton Lang (August 1, 1860, Vienna – February 28, 1940, Gars/Kamp) of Moravian descent, an architect and construction company manager, and Pauline "Paula" Schlesinger (July 26, 1864, Brünn – 1920, Manigfall) also from Moravia, as the second of 2 sons. His elder brother Adolf was nearly 7 years older. Both his father and his mother were practicing Roman Catholics, although his mother had been born Jewish and converted to Catholicism when her younger son was 10 years old. Paula Lang died from complications of breast cancer in 1920. Lang himself was baptized at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.
After finishing high school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. In 1910 he left Vienna to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris, France. The next year, he returned home to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War. In January 1914, he was drafted into service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania during World War I, where he was wounded three times.
While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company. His writing stint was brief, as Lang soon started to work as a director at the German film studio Ufa, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between art films such as Der Müde Tod (Destiny, literally "Tired Death") and populist thrillers such as Die Spinnen (Spiders), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema. In 1920, he met his future wife, the writer and actress Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including 1922's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), which ran for four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 1924's Die Nibelungen, the famed 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, and the 1931 classic, M, his first "talking" picture.
Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou in their Berlin flat, 1923 or 1924Although some consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. His work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin. In 1931, between Woman in the Moon and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Lang directed what many film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: M, a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work; it was remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey, but this version had little impact on audiences, and has become harder to see than the original film. Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director such as Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; he was known for being hard to work with. During the climactic final scene in M, he allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. He even wore a monocle that added to the stereotype.
Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang joined the MGM studio and directed the crime drama Fury. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Lang made twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his films as an independent. These films, often compared unfavourably by contemporary critics to Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated as being integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular.
During the 1950s, Lang found it harder to find congenial production conditions in Hollywood and his advancing age left him less inclined to grapple with American backers. The German producer, Artur Brauner, was expressing interest in remaking not only The Indian Tomb (a story that Lang had developed in the twenties that was ultimately taken from him by studio heads and directed instead by Joe May) but also Lang's earlier Doctor Mabuse pictures. Fearing that Brauner would proceed with or without his assent, Lang abandoned his plans for retirement and returned to Germany in order to make his Indian Epic, which is regarded as a masterpiece by a number of film scholars today. Following the production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his remake of Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding another original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), made in a hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can be viewed as the marriage between the director's early experiences with expressionist techniques in Germany as well as the spartan style already visible in his late American work. Lang was approaching blindness during the production, making it his final project.
One of his most famous film noirs is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. During this period, his visual style simplified (owing in part to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system) and his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1957).
Many of the rumors about Lang's life and career are hard to verify. The most famous rumor is that Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices for a meeting in which he gave Lang two pieces of news. The first was that his most recent film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933) was being banned as an incitement to public disorder. The second was that he was nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker, he was offering Lang a position as the head of German film studio UFA. Lang had been, unbeknownst to Goebbels, already planning to leave Germany for Paris, but the meeting with Goebbels ran so long that the banks were closed by the time it finished, and Lang fled that night without his money, not to return until after the war.
The problem is that many portions of the story cannot be checked, and of those that can, most are contradicted by the evidence: Lang actually left Germany with most of his money, unlike most refugees, and made several return trips later in the same year. There were, of course, no witnesses to the meeting besides Goebbels and Lang, but Goebbels's appointment books, when they refer to the meeting, mention only the banning of Testament. No evidence has been discovered in any of Goebbels's writings to affirm the suggestion that he was planning to offer Lang any position. Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt (1963), in which Lang appeared as himself, presents a bare outline of the story as fact.
Whatever the truth of this story, it is known that Lang did in fact leave Germany in 1934 and moved to Paris, where he filmed a version of Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer. This was Lang's only film in French (not counting the French version of Testament). He then went to the United States. Lang's wife Thea von Harbou, who had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the Nazi party (the NSDAP) in 1932, stayed behind. The two were divorced in 1933.
While his career had ended without fanfare, his American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma. Lang died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.
If you live in Los Angeles and love Poe, you must see Jeffrey Combs' authentic portrayal of both Poe the tragic genius and Poe the lost alcoholic.
From my previous post:
The production pleasantly astounded me. "Nevermore . . . An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe," playing at the Steve Allen Theater in East Hollywood, presents the most authentic portrayal of Poe I've ever seen. Blessed be for the re-teaming of actor Jeffrey Combs, director Stuart Gordon and writer Dennis Paoli. The team that brought us the Lovecraft and Poe movies reunites to show us Poe the intellectual, the wit, the satirist, the literateur, the magazinist, the lost son, the devoted husband, the devoted nephew, the neglected genius, and most of all, the drunkard. This is Poe as he suffered. If you want to see the true soul of Poe, go see Jeffrey Comb's portrayal of Poe. See how Poe's sensitive soul struggled to endure the tortures of living.
"Celebrate the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe's birth with the star of Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine & Enterprise. Set in 1848, Nevermore is loosely based on real events and follows Poe on a cross-country speaking tour fraught with strange occurrences that signal Poe's descent into madness."
Steve Allen Theater 4773 Hollywood Blvd. LA, CA 90027 800.595.4TIX
