Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy centerfold, actress and television personality who was famous, above all, for being famous, but also for being sporadically rich and chronically litigious, was found dead on Thursday in her suite at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla. She was 39, and the cause of her death was not immediately known.
A personal nurse traveling with Ms. Smith called the hotel operator at 1:38 p.m. to report she had found Ms. Smith alone and unconscious in her sixth-floor suite, the police said. Ms. Smith’s bodyguard arrived a few minutes later and tried to revive her with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, as did paramedics, who arrived after 2 p.m., they said, but she was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital at 2:49 p.m. The office of the Broward County Medical Examiner was to perform an autopsy on Friday morning.
Ms. Smith was widely known to television viewers as the star of “The Anna Nicole Show.” Ms. Smith was also familiar as a spokeswoman for TrimSpa, a diet supplement. (In a class-action suit filed in Los Angeles this month, Ms. Smith and TrimSpa’s manufacturer were accused of false and misleading marketing.)
Ms. Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan on Nov. 28, 1967, in Mexia, Tex. Her parents divorced when she was an infant, and her mother, Virgie, a police officer, reared her alone. When she was a teenager, she married Billy Smith, a 16-year-old fry cook. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1986; the couple divorced in 1987.
Ms. Smith worked as a waitress, later becoming a topless dancer in Houston. After submitting photos to Playboy, she appeared on the cover of the March 1992 issue. In 1993, she was named Playmate of the Year.
In 1994, Ms. Smith married J. Howard Marshall II, a Texas oil billionaire and former professor of trusts and estates at Yale Law School whom she had met in the course of her dancing career. She was 26; he was 89.
In 1995, after 14 months of marriage, Mr. Marshall died, setting off a series of legal victories and reversals, which for Ms. Smith included these: fighting Mr. Marshall’s son E. Pierce Marshall for the right to inherit his father’s estate; being awarded $474 million in federal court; having the award reduced to just under $89 million; having it overturned altogether; and appealing the case to the Supreme Court.
In May of last year, the justices ruled that the dispute properly belonged in federal court, giving Ms. Smith another chance to collect millions. Although E. Pierce Marshall died in June after a brief illness, the case was still pending at the time of Ms. Smith’s death.
On Sept. 7, 2006, Ms. Smith gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn. On Sept. 10, Daniel, Ms. Smith’s son from her first marriage, died suddenly while visiting mother and child in the hospital in the Bahamas. A medical examiner hired by the family found that the death was the accidental result of the interaction of methadone with antidepressants.
Besides her daughter, Dannielynn, Ms. Smith is survived by Mr. Stern, a lawyer who she said was the child’s father. (Last fall, Larry Birkhead, a former boyfriend of Ms. Smith, filed suit, claiming he had fathered Dannielynn.) Information on other survivors could not be confirmed.
Mr. Rale, Ms. Smith’s lawyer, said the paternity issue would be addressed at a court hearing on Friday in Los Angeles. In an interview with Los Angeles magazine in 1994, Ms. Smith was asked whether her rapid success troubled her in any way.
“Oh, no, I like it,” she said. “I love the paparazzi. They take pictures, and I just smile away. I’ve always liked attention. I didn’t get it very much growing up, and I always wanted to be, you know, noticed.”
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