Brittany Murphy described herself as "one of those show people" and stated in interviews that her earliest memories were of wanting to entertain people. She got her start in community theater at the age of 9, and by the time she was 13, she appearing in commercials. Television roles followed soon thereafter, and she easily made the jump to film.
Falling into something of a type-casting rut as a troubled or mentally disturbed teen, Murphy nonetheless managed to make a smooth transition from child actor to adult roles, perhaps aided by the fairly large amount of voice acting she did for video games and cartoons, or perhaps because she was "one of those show people," just like she said. Murphy also seems to have stayed clear of the party scenes and drug abuse that wreck the careers of so many young actors.
Murphy appeared mostly in romantic comedies and dramas, athough she did manage to work in a number of sci-fi movies, thrillers, and horror films, such as "Abandoned", "The Devil's Arithmatic", "Cherry Falls", "The Dead Girl", "MegaFault", "Deadline", and the yet-to-be released "Something Wicked".
Brittany Murphy passed away in 2009 from cardiac arrest induced by anemia and dehydration brought on by her attempt to self-medicate pneumonia with over-the-counter medicines. (Bizarrely, her husband died a few months later from the exact same cause. There's either a conspiracy theory or a horror movie script in that somewhere.)