To actress Brittany Murphy, he was a “soulmate.”
To others, he’s the dubious, debt-riddled dude widely known as “Conjack.”
Little-known British screenwriter Simon Monjack, 39, found himself suddenly thrust into the spotlight Sunday after Murphy, his 32-year-old wife, mysteriously went into cardiac arrest, collapsed in the shower of their Hollywood Hills home and died.
Monjack — the star’s husband of two years — appeared “dazed” in their driveway as emergency personnel worked in vain to save Murphy, witnesses said.
He later asked Cedars-Sinai medical staff not to perform an autopsy on the actress, said the Web site TMZ.com, but the procedure was done yesterday.
“My world was destroyed yesterday,” Monjack told “Access Hollywood” in an interview.
As word of Murphy’s death spread, so, too, did interest in the man she quietly married in 2007 after a whirlwind romance.
When they wed, Murphy — who’d had a string of broken engagements and famously dated her “Just Married” movie co-star Ashton Kutcher — told pals the “easiest thing” she’d ever done was to marry Monjack, whom she called her soulmate.
But the duo was plagued by rumors that they rushed to the altar in May 2007 because Monjack’s visa had expired.
Three months earlier, Monjack — who previously had dated Sen. John Kerry’s daughter, Alexandra — spent nine days in the slammer and faced deportation after being arrested by immigration officials for overstaying his legal welcome.
In a bizarre twist, pals of Murphy would later say the actress claimed Monjack had been “kidnapped” — not jailed — and that she had to pay a ransom.
In a 2008 interview with The Post, Monjack claimed to have fallen in love with Murphy during a photo shoot while she was in her teens.
“I was very patient,” Monjack told writer Matt Donnelly.
But public records show that while he waited for Murphy to grow up, Monjack kept busy with a string of financial messes and another marriage.
In 2005, Virginia authorities issued warrants for Monjack’s arrest on credit-card fraud and theft allegations, but did not pursue charges.
In 2006, he was sued in New York by mortgage firm Coutts and Co. and was forced to fork over $470,000. Between 1997 and 2006, Monjack was evicted from four separate homes, the records show.
And, in 2007, his ex-wife, Simone Bienne, a UK television personality he’d married in Las Vegas in 2001, sued him in LA. She was awarded the $63,000 he hadn’t paid in their 2006 divorce.
In late 2008, Monjack — dogged by reports he had a brood of out-of-wedlock kids — crowed to People.com that he and Murphy planned to start a family, although “according to the Internet, I already have several!”