KEY POINTS:
LOS ANGELES - Actress Lindsay Lohan's publicist fired back at the media yesterday, saying journalists had crossed a line by mocking a heartfelt letter the screen star wrote following director Robert Altman's death last week.
Spokeswoman Leslie Sloane said the note -- which one columnist suggested was composed
by Lohan on "one of her legendary party benders" -- was instead dashed off by the distraught 20-year-old actress on a Blackberry, moments after she learnt Altman had died.
Altman, who died on November 20 at age 81, directed Lohan in the last film of his career, A Prairie Home Companion.
"When I got the reports that he had died, I reached Lindsay on her cell phone, and she had no idea. She was devastated. She started crying," Sloane told Reuters. "She quickly put something together on her Blackberry."
"Here was a girl who found something special in this man that she felt so close to," Sloane said. "And she was completely shocked and blown away that he just died. It was written very quickly and it was from the heart."
Lohan titled her November 21 email "Dead is hard, Life is much easier", a quote she attributes to actor Jack Nicholson. In it, she sent condolences to Altman's family, adding, "I feel as I've just had the wind knocked out of me".
The film star, who is famously estranged from her father, also describes Altman as "the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years".
Days after the missive was made public, Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison ridiculed it on a website as "alarmingly incoherent", apparently referring to misspellings and grammatical errors by Lohan, and wrote that Altman himself might find it "comedic".
Andrew Gumbel wrote in the Independent that the letter, which ends with the odd sign-off "Be Adequite", had become the talk of Hollywood.
"Was the actress on a misguided -- and utterly botched -- quest for publicity, exploiting the death of a revered director for her own purposes?" Gumbel wrote. "Had she been on one of her legendary party benders? Or was this Exhibit A for the indictment of America's education system?"
Other media quickly picked up on the story, an example of what Sloane said was a steady drumbeat of derisive stories about Lohan in the tabloids, which often focus on her penchant for parties and nightclubs.
"Its enough already," she said. "Everybody has got to get a life. People need to get off her back."
- REUTERS