The voice at the end of the line was barely coherent. ‘I have not slept for more than two days,’ explained Simon Monjack, when we spoke to him on the phone earlier this week.

He was, he said, utterly disoriented by the way his life had been torn apart in an instant.

Mr Monjack was referring to the moment — ‘8.30am last Sunday’ — when his wife, Hollywood actress Brittany Murphy, 32, was found unconscious in the bathroom of their Los Angeles home following a suspected heart attack. She never regained consciousness.

‘My world was destroyed,’ said Mr Monjack, who was born in North London to Jewish parents. He and Brittany, he revealed, were planning to start a family.

Under different circumstances, it would have been impossible not to take his words at face value: simply those of a grief-stricken husband who had lost the love of his life.