Brittany Murphy, the Hollywood actress who starred as a geeky girl in Clueless and a sex siren in Sin City, died yesterday after apparently suffering a heart attack.

Murphy, 32, was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles and pronounced dead upon arrival. A hospital spokesman would not provide a cause of death.

The city’s fire service had responded to an emergency call made from a home in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, belonging to her husband, the British screenwriter Simon Monjack. The online gossip site TMZ said her mother had discovered Murphy unconscious in the shower.

Clare Staples, a neighbour, said she saw firefighters trying to resuscitate the actress while she was on a stretcher. However, "it looked like she was dead on the scene", she told the Associated Press. Monjack, wearing pyjama bottoms and no shoes, appeared "dazed" as he looked on, helpless.

Los Angeles police have opened an investigation into Murphy’s death, Officer Norma Eisenman said. Detectives and coroner’s officials were at Murphy’s home but did not talk to reporters.

Murphy had been in the news recently with claims that she had been fired from The Caller, a film she had started shooting in Puerto Rico. A representative denied she had been sacked, saying: "She was not nor has she ever been fired from any job big or small ... [Due] to creative differences Ms Murphy and the production mutually parted ways." The news followed her removal three years ago from the film Tinker Bell, which was released in 2008 and based around the fairy in Peter Pan. Walt Disney had announced that she would be voicing the eponymous character, before she was replaced by Mae Whitman in unclear circumstances.

She had completed filming for Sylvester Stallone’s film The Expendables, to be released in 2010.

Her career got a boost in 2003 when she featured as rapper Eminem’s girlfriend in 8 Mile. Her voice has also given life to a number of animated characters, including Luanne Platter in King of the Hill, Gloria the Penguin in Happy Feet. She has often been the subject of press controversy and in 2005 denied rumours of a cocaine habit.

"Just for the record I have never tried it in my entire life, I’ve never even seen it, and I don’t leave the house too much, except to go to work," she told Knight Ridder Newspapers.

"My worst vice is caffeine. [The rumour is] really pretty darn far-fetched."I have known people over the course of my life that have bad problems with drugs, and it's something really serious." Murphy is an ex-girlfriend of the rapper Eminem and actor Ashton Kutcher now Demi Moore’s husband.

Murphy’s father, Angelo Bertolotti, said he learnt of her death from his son. "She was just an absolute doll since she was born," Bertolotti said. "Her personality was always outward. Everybody loved her — people that made movies with her, people on a cruise — they all loved her. She was just a regular gal." Mr Bertolotti was in the mob and served prison time on federal drug charges. He hadn’t seen Murphy in years.

Born November 10, 1977, in Atlanta, Murphy grew up in New Jersey and moved to Los Angeles with her mother, Sharon, to pursue acting.

She was brought up singlehandedly by her mother, whom she helped battle breast cancer since it was first diagnosed in 1995, at one point temporarily giving up acting to support her through a second round of chemotherapy. Three years ago, Murphy told an American health magazine that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer herself.

"Thank God it was OK ... They removed the lumps," she told Self magazine. "That’s when it became even clearer how personal it all is. It made me understand what it must have been like for my mother."

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