Celebrity

INSIDE STORY: The 'Spider-Man' Actress Who Hanged Herself

"She had everything," a friend of Lucy Gordon says. "She was hiding that turmoil inside"

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Published on May 28, 2009 05:00PM EDT

British actress Lucy Gordon seemed to have it all. A role in Spider-Man 3 launched her into the big time, she had just wrapped a new movie, and she was living with a man she adored.

With so many positive reasons to live, her friends and family were stunned when she was found hanged in an apparent suicide in her Paris apartment on May 20 – two days before what would have been her 29th birthday.

“Nobody can understand why she did this horrible thing,” the teenage daughter of her companion Jerome Almeras told the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday. It was father-of-four Almeras who reportedly found Gordon in the apartment they shared. He, like her family, has been left devastated.

From Modeling to Acting

Gordon entered the world of modeling when she was in her teens, appearing as a face of Cover Girl cosmetics. That work led to acting and her movie debut came in 2001 with Perfume. The following year she appeared in historical drama The Four Feathers with Heath Ledger.

She knew France well, having vacationed there often during her childhood with her family – she has a younger sister, Katie, 27 – and her film career was burgeoning there. She starred in a comedy with Audrey Tautou called The Russian Dolls in 2005 and a French movie Cineman, which is due for release later this year.

Gordon played a TV reporter in 2007’s Spider-Man 3 and had just finished filming her role as British model-actress Jane Birkin in the biopic of Serge Gainsbourg when she died.

“She told me she was in love with her boyfriend,” Michel Haddi, who photographed her for Italian Vanity Fair, told the Mail on Sunday.

“She had everything to go for. She was hiding that turmoil inside.”

Although Paris police were investigating, her father Richard Gordon has said that there was no indication of anyone else being involved in her death. He said she left two notes.

Mr. Gordon spoke out, some British papers reported, to bring a halt to speculation about the case. “There is no question of foul play. Lucy committed suicide. Police are not investigating anything else. There are no signs of a struggle,” he said May 22.

Suicide Note

“She has left a note to us and a letter detailing her last wishes regarding her own estate.”

He added to London’s Evening Standard that he was in contact with Almeras. “We know him and we like him. We speak to him daily and he is also distraught.”

Her London agent had no further news Wednesday of when there would be a funeral or an inquest into her death.