Brittany Murphy

Murphy came up as a working child actor on American television, in The Torkelsons and its continuation Almost Home, before Clueless made her Tai as a teenager. That performance is the film's engine. Tai arrives as the punchline and leaves as the character with the most self-knowledge in the story, and Murphy plays the whole arc without ever making the earlier version look stupid.

Her instrument was the voice, a scratchy break that could tip into comedy or damage in a syllable, and she spent the next decade proving she would rather use it on the damage. Freeway, Girl Interrupted, Don't Say a Word, Spun, The Dead Girl: a run of unglamorous, frequently unwell young women taken on deliberately by an actress who was being offered much easier work. She kept the easier work going too, in Just Married and Uptown Girls, and she was very good in the mainstream register when the film met her halfway, most obviously as Alex in 8 Mile.

Alongside all of it she voiced Luanne Platter on King of the Hill from 1997, one of the great sustained voice performances in American animation, plus Gloria in Happy Feet and a role in the Futurama film. She died in 2009, with several small independent films still coming out.