Brittany Murphy autopsy suggests ‘normal’ death

The autopsy on Hollywood actress Brittany Murphy has been completed and shows no signs of foul play, according to sources of the US website TMZ. Her body looked "normal". But the autopsy has not resolved the reason for her sudden death following cardiac arrest on Sunday, which means that the official cause of death has been deferred for four to six weeks pending reports, including a toxicology test to determine what prescription drugs were in her system.

The news from the Los Angeles County Coroner's department emerged as a Hollywood journalist recalled Murphy mentioning a heart condition in a 2002 interview. Michael Adams had asked the actress, then promoting her film 8 Mile in which she played rapper Eminem's girlfriend, about drug abuse.

"She laughed and said even if she wanted to she couldn't take [illegal
substances] because she'd had a heart condition since she was a little
girl," said Adams.

While Murphy's husband, screenwriter Simon Monjack, said on Monday that she had been ill with laryngitis, other reports from LA have mentioned a range of problems over the years, physical and mental.

Some of her friends believe she has suffered with issues of "body image" ever since her first hit film Clueless in 1995, in which she played the fat geeky girl opposite the cute, slim Alicia Silverstone character.

Amy Heckerling, director of Clueless, said on Monday: "She seemed to go through a change ... on Clueless. Maybe she felt like she was not the skinny, pretty girl, you know? And then the next few movies she was, you know, thinner, blonde ... and going out with Eminem and Ashton Kutcher, and suddenly got more into that whole glamorous scene... I think she felt the pressure to become a different sort of commodity to survive in show business, and I think it was awful."

Rumours that she had become anorexic resurfaced earlier this month when Murphy was reported to have looked "frail" as well as "distracted and dazed" at the opening of a clothing store, and latest photographs appeared to show her looking particularly thin.

She was recently the subject of a harsh Saturday Night Live sketch which portrayed the 32-year-old actress as severely disorientated, apparently prompted by reports of her being sacked from the set of The Caller in Puerto Rico for being "difficult". The sketch has now been removed from the show's website.

The Wrap website reports that there were problems too on
another film set. While shooting scenes in Oregon for an independent movie, Something Wicked, one eyewitness said: "She was barely there... She'd go in and out of consciousness in the middle of takes." ·