Anna Nicole Smith was born Vickie Lynn Marshall on November 28, 1967. She died on the 8th of February, 2007. Anna Nicole was a model and television personality, best known for her stints as a Playboy Playmate, as a model for Guess jeans, and for her reality TV show “The Anna Nicole Show”.
She was born in Houston Texas, the only child of Donald Eugene Hogan and Virgie Mae Tabers. Two years later, her father left, and she and her half brother went on to be raised by their mother and their aunt.
Anna Nicole went to school at the Durkee Elementary School and Aldine Intermediate School in Houston, Texas. When she reached the 9th grade, she was sent to live with her younger aunt in Mexia, Texas, where she went to Mexia High School. She failed her freshman year and quit during her sophomore year, after which she continued working as a waitress at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken.
It was at Jim’s that she met Billy Wayne Smith, the 16 year old cook, and they got married on April 4, 1985. The following year, their son Daniel Wayne was born. Anna Nicole and Billy separated in 1987, and she moved to Houston with their child. The official divorce however, only came in February of 1993.
She then started working at Wal-Mart, then as a waitress at Red Lobster, before becoming an exotic dancer in 1991. She saw an ad for Playboy magazine audition in the newspaper and the rest is history.
She was chosen by Hugh Hefner himself to be on the cover for the March 1992 issue of Playboy, and by 1993, she was the magazine’s Playmate of the Year. She then got a contract to replace Claudia Schiffer as an image model for the Guess jeans campaign, and the resulting images were a pop culture smash. The black-and-white images capitalized on her strong resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, and she received other modelling offers because of the success of this one, like her campaign for Hennes & Mauritz of Sweden. Photos of her in H&M underwear appeared on posters across Sweden and Norway.
In 1994, Anna Nicole made her first out of many tabloid appearances, for her marriage to elderly oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall, whom she met while she was a stripper at Gigi’s in Houston in 1991. Thirteen months after their marriage, in August of 1995, J. Howard Marshall died. A legal battle then ensued concerning his inheritance between Anna Nicole and the rest of his family, a battle that reached all the way to the Supreme Court and which is still continuing today, more than a year after her death, in the name of Anna Nicole’s young daughter.
Meanwhile, the 1990s continued with Anna Nicole doing what models do when they become famous — she crossed over into show business! Anna Nicole made appearances in films like “The Hudsucker Proxy” and “Naked gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” in 1994, before going on to star in B-movie bombs like “To The Limit” and “Skyscraper” in 1995 and 1996.
Her legal battles, weight issues, and increasingly bizarre behaviour soon made her a tabloid queen, and fodder for many late night talk show comedians. She soon turned all those problems into assets though, when she got her own reality TV show ala “The Osbournes”, from the E! cable network. “The Anna Nicole Show” had cameras following her everywhere, documenting her weird ways, and the show’s debut was the highest rated series for E! at that time. Ratings did drop after a while, but it has achieved cult status, and was able to run until 2004. It was also during this period that she became a spokesperson for TrimSpa, an infamous incident concerning this being her appearance at the 2004 American Music Awards with a trim, sexy body, but still with slurred speech and eccentric behaviour. More TV guest appearances and cheap direct-to-video flicks followed, until the final media frenzy in the year or two before her death.
It was in June of 2006 that Anna Nicole announced on her website that she was pregnant, and her daughter Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern was born on September 7 of that year in the Bahamas, where Anna Nicole was then residing. A few days later, her son Daniel Wayne Smith died in her hospital room while visiting her and his newborn sister. This double-feature of true life and death dramas touched off a media frenzy until the day of Anna Nicole’s death, which made the story even bigger. Stories regarding who Dannielynn’s true father was (multiple men claimed paternity), and how Daniel Wayne died filled both mainstream and showbiz news shows.
At Daniel Wayne’s funeral, Anna Nicole even climbed into the coffin, saying she wanted to be buried with him. “The Anna Nicole Show” was technically over on E!, but in practical terms, it continued on, with other channels now in on it too.
On September 28, 2006, Anna Nicole and her long-time lawyer and friend Howard K. Stern exchanged vows in a private commitment ceremony aboard a 41-foot catamaran off the coast of the Bahamas. Then on February 8, 2007, Anna Nicole was found unresponsive in room 607 at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Florida. CPR was performed and paramedics called, but she never regained consciousness. “Combined drug intoxication” was announced as the cause of death after a seven week investigation, with sleeping medication as a major component and no illegal substances included.