When we were very young

Today's news of the sudden death of Brittany Murphy from cardiac arrest is all the more sad and poignant for those of us who grew up knowing and loving her since the Clueless days in 1995.

Though Hollywood has experienced plenty of celebrity deaths recently, this might only be the second time that someone I have personally idolized and whose career I've followed has died within my lifetime. The first was Heath Ledger, which was shocking to me both because he wasn't much older than me and because I'd been a huge fan since the first time he appeared, greasy-haired and brooding, in 10 Things I Hate About You.

It was the first time someone whose posters I had plastered on various dorm room and bedroom walls, whose movies I could recite by heart, had passed away. When I found out, I was in the office of the newspaper I was interning for at the time, staring blankly at the anchor on Newsworld (no, I will NOT call it NN) who was telling me my favorite young heartthrob was dead. How was this possible? He was beautiful, talented, young, rich, famous... did I mention beautiful? It took months for me to stop doing a double-take when I heard people talk about him in the past tense, and seeing The Dark Knight a year later was disturbing, especially since his time spent in character as the Joker was credited as one of the factors in the medication cocktail that led to his accidental overdose. It will never stop being bizarre to me that he is dead -- just this week I saw the first bus-stop posters for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and it gave me a jolt.

Hearing about Brittany Murphy gave me similar feelings, though I can't claim to have spent quite as many hours mooning over pictures of her as I did of Ledger. Almost every girl I know who was born in the 80s practically grew up quoting lines from Clueless. For better or worse, that movie shaped the way we perceived Hollywood, teenagers, dating, and the high school clique system. Though critics would point to its idolization of the rich, white and thin as a horrible influence on young girls, its true fans know that it was tongue-in-cheek and promoted good values in the end. Besides, it's based on Jane Austen's Emma... and nothing based on Austen, however loosely, can ever be just fluff.

My point is that for the first time, my generation is seeing our own personal idols start to pass away in a most disturbingly human way. We weren't old enough to get it when River Phoenix died. I was ten years old when Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Likewise, the people who've been the most affected by the recent passing of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze, are the ones who grew up with them and watching them. If you remember where you were when the Jackson 5's biggest hits came out, or when the Thriller video basically invented MTV, or when every single one of your female classmates and their mothers had the Farrah Flip, those stars were your peers and it's a shock when you realize they are mortal.

Brittany Murphy was only seven years older than me -- I watched her grow up from an awkward 18-year-old playing a comic-relief outsider to a glamorous actress capable of playing the confident independent woman or morbidly complex roles. She was underrated in Hollywood while she was alive, and I am sure her tragic death will bring out oodles of the kind of praise MJ got -- the dubious kind that often rings false.

But today, we -- her oldest fans -- will honour her the best way we know how... by remembering her least-polished but most-loved performance.