A Keen Sense of Selves

An amusing incident occurs the day before an interview with Brittany Murphy. Actor Justin Long, one of her pals and her red-carpet date for this year’s MTV Movie Awards, has agreed to talk about this young actress, who finds her star rising in three prominent fall movies (“Sidewalks of New York,” “Don’t Say a Word,” “Riding in Cars With Boys”).

But sitting on the patio at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, Long becomes momentarily confused.

“First of all, she’s very normal, she can act and she’s not a diva. I’m very protective of her. Both of our characters are supposed to lose their virginity together, it was my first love scene--”

Not that Britney, as in Britney Spears, with whom Justin has just shot some of the pop star’s first intimate on-screen scenes for the 2002 release “What Are Friends For,” this Brittany.

“You mean Brittany Murphy?” he asks, changing gears but not his level of enthusiasm. “You feel like you know her the minute you meet her because she is so present as an actor....We were in the car together on the way to the MTV Movie Awards and she talked about the media.

“She helped me with that. Because of the Britney thing, it has been weird,” said Long (whose credits include “Jeepers Creepers” and the role of Warren on NBC’s “Ed”).

Which points up a larger issue about Murphy, whom most people may remember as Winona Ryder’s chicken-obsessed, suicidal roommate, Daisy, in “Girl, Interrupted.”

Recognition isn’t always immediate. This may be because the 23-year-old Edison, N.J., native has been gracefully coming of age on screens large and small for 10 years.

A homemade song-and-dance act since the age of 2, Murphy discovered “a kid’s head shot on a corkboard in my dance class. And I thought, ‘Wow, there’s a place you can go and be on TV?”’

By age 9 she was doing regional theater and musicals. “Finally my mom caved when I was 12--it took five years of coercing--she took me to New York to find a manager because that’s where things happen.”

A manager in Manhattan led to pilot season in Los Angeles. On her “13th audition for network” she landed in the Dabney Coleman comedy “Drexell’s Class.” On television, she’s the voice of Luanne on Fox’s animated “King of the Hill”--a voice Murphy describes as “a mixture of Jessica Lange in ‘Blue Sky’ and Juliette Lewis in ‘Kalifornia.”’

Murphy’s breakout film role as Tai in the mid-’90s teen trendsetter tale “Clueless” correlates to her life in Hollywood since she packed up her mom, Sharon, who raised her alone, and moved out here for good in the early ‘90s.

The chic transformation her new-kid-on-the-block character underwent in “Clueless” parallels Murphy’s emerging glamour.

“Before, I didn’t know how actors got to look so pretty. They have stylists, hair and makeup [artists]. I look at old photos from the ‘Clueless’ premiere, and I look like a little meatball on top of another meatball,” she says.

Helping with her Hollywood make-over is best friend and confidant Winona Ryder (who was recuperating from stomach flu in a London hospital and unavailable for an interview).

“Noni has basically been through everything a zillion times over. Something as simple as dressing classy in pictures, she’ll advise me on it.

“I have never said anything about it in print before, because it’s weird to talk about a friend. But she’s really there for me and my ultimate mentor.”

In “Sidewalks of New York,” director Edward Burns’ pastiche of New Yorkers’ intertwined lives, Murphy plays Ashley, a teenager caught in a dead-end romance with lecherous married dentist Stanley Tucci. It’s a sophisticated performance that reveals edges of her real-life personality and reflects the adolescent-to-woman transition still taking place although she is firmly in her 20s.

“I knew Brittany from ‘Clueless.’ Quite honestly, I couldn’t see [casting her] at first,” actor-director Burns admits. “Then I saw ‘Girl, Interrupted’ and a clip reel of some scenes. Clearly this is an actress who can do anything.

“She’s one of those talents that is a real chameleon. She was able to be vulnerable without playing the victim--I don’t know how you do that, but she does. When we did a screening to sell to distributors, I remember hearing the next day she had two different offers from two studios.”

A clip reel of Murphy’s film work thus far would include her turn as a “sport tart,” in the current Freddie Prinze Jr. baseball movie “Summer Catch,” as well as performances from earlier roles in “Freeway” (1996), “Drop Dead Gorgeous” (1999) and last year’s “Cherry Falls,” in which she says she played “the girl with dark hair chased by a drag-queen serial killer, which sounded like fun.”

Murphy will also star as “a crystal meth head who is Mickey Rourke’s girlfriend,” as she puts it, in “Spun” (starring Jason Schwartzman) in 2002, the first feature directed by Madonna-video wizard Jonas Akerlund.

“Don’t Say a Word” director Gary Fleder (“Kiss the Girls”), who cast Murphy as a hardened psychiatric patient in need of some fast mental safecracking by Michael Douglas’ desperate shrink in the upcoming 20th Century Fox release, agreed with Burns’ assessment of Murphy’s gift.

“Gift” is the operative word, because even she sums up her skills in three words: no formal training.

This is “a performer,” as Murphy dubs herself, who grew up watching “‘Crayon versus Crayon’ [‘Kramer vs. Kramer’], that’s what I called it,” and idolizes an eclectic mix of pop culture personalities from silent screen star Clara Bow to Madonna and Lange.

“I would compare her to Edward Norton, they’re both incredibly smart, highly gifted actors who are very instinctual,” Fleder says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her repeat herself on-screen. And like Edward Norton, she can play a lead with ease, but also do great character work.

“You can’t predict who’s going to be a star, no one can, but she exudes so much humanity, I see her right up there.”

Flattery aside, what is she doing that makes her star-worthy enough to be nominated this year for Movieline’s Young Hollywood Awards as a superstar of tomorrow?

“You’ve seen her Gap ads, right?” Fleder offers. “And she was on the cover of Maxim. Incredibly sexy, va-voom, but she doesn’t let it get in the way.

“Let me tell you a little story. We were casting a Janis Joplin project (‘A Piece of My Heart’) that has been shelved because of rights problems. Brittany came in to read for us. She said, ‘Do you mind if I sing?’

“What was startling is that it was an interpretation of ‘Me & Bobby McGee’ with some of the same phrasing, but I had never heard it sung like that. She floored me.”

Although at 5 foot 3, Murphy may be more of a ringer for Edith Piaf than Janis Joplin (though in fact Murphy did front a band early in her career), there is a common thread to her performances: the impending threat of emotional danger that is in some way ultimately redemptive. The characters “are all using my tears and snot and sweat and bruises, just in different contexts.”

“There’s probably 800 people living inside of here, so they all pop out in different ways. It’s like me, myself, and I and I!”

Reconsidering, she adds, “Well, maybe there’s more like 200 people in here. Obviously they look like me, the facial structure. It’s kind of like a ghost thing. I love changing my look.”

For someone who never studied acting, Brittany has had to fashion her inner and outer worlds to make sense of her craft, and not just for the movies. She remade herself into a perfect 1950s Brooklyn teenager in Arthur Miller’s “View From a Bridge” in 1998, which received remarkable critical acclaim (in part because it was overseen by Miller himself) from audiences and actors alike.

“There was one night when Julia Roberts was there, Tom Hanks and his wife and Paul Newman had come and Joanne Woodward,” she remembers from the run of the play at Broadway’s Roundabout Theater.

In the audience, “all these people at different moments or some time all together. I think that will help you get over a fear of being star-struck very quickly.”

For “Riding in Cars With Boys,” the Drew Barrymore movie that spans 30 years in a woman’s life (Barrymore also executive produces), what got Murphy the part was, oddly enough, the test from Fleder’s Joplin project, according to “Riding” director Penny Marshall. “It was incredible.”

At the moment, Marshall is riding around in cars with cell phones because “she has no time,” her assistant insists.

The key thing the director says is “she’s so alive,” as if that statement aptly describes whatever it is that Murphy gives to the screen.

“I talked to Michael [Douglas] the other day,” Marshall continues. “In order to get in the mood, she will sing to herself. She [Murphy] asked Michael, ‘Does this bother you?’ He said no. But after a couple months, he said, ‘Yes!”’

Marshall turns serious: “I don’t like to compare [actors] because that ruins their individuality. Did you know she can sing? She’s does ‘Soldier Boy’ a cappella in the movie. And I can tell you this, she’s on a roll.

“I think the chemistry between her and Drew is great,” Marshall adds. “I saw that when we read them together. People will get very hooked into the [sister] relationship.”

Murphy thinks so too. “When I met Drew, it was like meeting someone who speaks English in a foreign country. It was just an immediate energy source.

“We both kind of put our hands up [and touched] and just walked out of the door like that. You don’t meet too many people who complement your energy like that.”

Working with Marshall, Murphy says, was “great. She’s like an aunt or something.”

Summing up her experience in the movies thus far, Murphy offers a final anecdote. “My cousin Bobby came to visit me. He owns a construction company, Murphy Construction, Edison, N.J., a little plug there. He came to visit, and we were on Hart’s Island doing ‘Don’t Say a Word.’ He’d never been on a film set before. He said, ‘Wait a minute, you all live in trailers? Michael Douglas lives in a trailer?”’

Murphy said she explained to her cousin that the life actors lead is like “a bunch of gypsy travelers, no matter how famous they are or anything. We’re all of the same species.”

Sounds like she has aced Fame 101. *