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Who calls their mother-in-law, "baby"?
By Megan Hatch — Written on Oct 15, 2021
After the release of HBO Max's new documentary about the late-actress Brittany Murphy, "What Happened to Brittany Murphy," new details of her husband's relationship with Murphy's mother are coming to light.
One of the major factors of her death explored in the new documentary involves her mother Sharon and her husband Simon Monjack. The documentary doesn't go into the nature of their relationship, however, many people speculated the two were actually romantically involved.
At 32-years-old, Murphy was found dead in her Hollywood Hills home on Dec. 20, 2009, and the cause of death for the "Clueless" actress was pneumonia and anemia.
Were Sharon Murphy and Simon Monjack in a relationship?
Rumors about these two being romantically linked after Murphy's death have also divided fans of the actress and while we may never know the truth, there certainly are some strange aspects of their relationship.
Simon Monjack allegedly shared a bed with Brittany Murphy's mother.
After Murphy's death and before Monjack passed away — less than five months after Brittany of the same causes — Sharon and Monjack continued to live together.
And, according to some source were sharing a bed together. It was never reported if the two had any sexual relationship.
Murphy grew up with her mother most of her life as her father Angelo Bertolotti was pretty much out of the picture because he was a mobster in New York, and in 2003 he was found guilty of racketeering, organized crime, and counterfeit scamming.
As a teen, Murphy moved to California with her mother and that's when her career in acting started. She rose to fame fast with movies "8-mile" and "Clueless" that she met other A-list celebrities and met people at parties, including her husband Monjack, a British writer-director-photographer at a party in 2006 when she was 29-years-old and he was 37-years-old.
A year later the two married in her home in Hollywood Hills, however, apparently ever since they got married, friends of Brittany at the time said he was very manipulative and tried to take control over her entire life and career by managing her himself and firing her entire team. He controlled her by confiscating her phone and was in charge of her finances.
Sharon Murphy and Simon Monjack's infamous photoshoot ignited rumors.
What really set tongues wagging after Murphy died was that Monjack and Sharon seemed to be really close.
The pair even did a photoshoot together — included below — after Brittany’s death which, according to a source in the documentary, looked like “parents grieving as opposed to a husband and his mother-in-law."
Simon Monjack appeared to call Sharon 'baby' during an interview.
The two were also featured in some interviews, specifically, one with Larry David where Monjack called Sharon "baby."
He was also asked about an autopsy of her body to which Monjack replied that he wouldn't want that because Murphy had, "this pristine body, curvy in all the right places, with skin like silk … How could I say 'cut it up' in front of her mother?”
During that same time, there were lots of rumors that Monjack and Sharon were a couple as they seemed to have gotten really close after Murphy's death — even talking about moving to New York together two months before Monjack died.
Sharon also responded to the rumors after he died as "disgusting,” saying "we’re close friends and we’re family. It’s an awful and ridiculous thing to say.”
It's suspicious to some people that Sharon was the one to find both her daughter and her son-in-law dead. Brittany's father Bertolotti didn't believe the cause of death and believed it was a murder situation with poison, to which Sharon refused to accept.
Both Murphy and Monjack were also taking multiple prescriptions and both were very ill before they died. Since their deaths, Sharon has been out of the public eye and her last words to the press were in her 2013 open letter to The Hollywood Reporter.
Megan Hatch is a writer at YourTango who covers news & entertainment, love & relationships, and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.