Simon Monjack Biography

Simon Mark Monjack (9 March 1970 - 23 May 2010) was a British screenwriter, film director, film producer and make-up artist. He was the widower of American actress Brittany Murphy.

Early life

Monjack was born in Hillingdon, Middlesex, to a Jewish family. He grew up in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. He attended Juniper Hill School, Flackwell Heath, then Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. When he was 15, his father, William (1949-1986), died of a brain tumour in Oxfordshire. His mother Linda (ne Hall), a hypnotherapist, lives in Bourne End.

Career

Monjack directed, produced, and wrote the B-movie Two Days, Nine Lives in 2000. He received story credit for the 2006 biopic Factory Girl about Warhol actress/model Edie Sedgwick. Director George Hickenlooper contended that "Monjack had nothing to do with Factory Girl" and that "he filed a frivolous lawsuit against us [...] making bogus claims that we had stolen his script. He held us literally hostage and we were forced to settle with him as he held our production over a barrel." Monjack denied these claims. In 2007, E! News reported that Monjack was slated to direct a film adaptation of D. M. Thomas's novel about Sigmund Freud, The White Hotel, with Brittany Murphy cast in a leading role. The project never materialized.

Legal troubles

In 2005, warrants were issued for Monjack's arrest in Virginia on charges of credit card fraud, but the charges were later dropped.

In 2006, Coutts Bank successfully sued Monjack, who had been evicted from four homes, for $470,000.

In February 2007, Monjack was arrested and spent nine days in jail, facing deportation, because his visa to the United States had expired.

Personal life

Monjack married Simone Bienne in Las Vegas in November 2001; they separated five months later, and were divorced in 2006. That year, he met actress Brittany Murphy (although he claimed to have met her when she was a teenager and stayed in touch). In April 2007, he married her in a private Jewish ceremony at their Los Angeles home. The couple did not announce their engagement beforehand and rarely made public appearances together before their marriage.

In late November 2009, TMZ reported that Monjack became "incoherent" during a flight from Puerto Rico to Los Angeles. Murphy told the responding firefighters at LAX Airport that she believed he was having an asthma attack and felt that the situation was not serious; however, EMTs disagreed and rushed him to a nearby hospital.

On 20 December 2009, Murphy died after collapsing in their bathroom. The cause was later revealed to be pneumonia, with secondary factors of iron-deficiency anemia and multiple prescription drug intoxication.

Death

In January 2010, Monjack's mother, Linda Monjack, told People that her son was "unwell, and the doctors are carrying out tests. On whether he has a heart problem it is not really for me to say, you must ask him, but yes, there have been health problems in the past. I believe it's common knowledge, and it"?s been in the press that he had a slight heart attack a week from Brittany's death."

Monjack was found dead on 23 May 2010 in his house in Hollywood, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office. Law enforcement sources say the Los Angeles Fire Department was called there for a medical emergency after Murphy's mother, Sharon, found Monjack unconscious in the master bedroom around 9:20 pm, and then called 911. Paramedics arrived; Monjack was pronounced dead at 9:45 pm after suffering a fatal myocardial infarction.

The coroner's report found the cause of Monjack's death to be acute pneumonia and severe anemia, similar to the causes attributed to his wife's death five months earlier in the same house. He was buried at the Forest Lawn cemetery in the Hollywood Hills next to Murphy.