Anna Nicole Smith

The major story of last week was Anna Nicole Smith's death on Thursday, February 8. Anna Nicole Smith (39), 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 in a hotel room at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. The official cause of her death is still unknown, although foul play was ruled out by the medical examiner and there were no traces of drugs found in her stomach. Her body will be preserved until February 20 so that a hearing in the paternity suit over her daughter, Dannielee, can be held.

Although Anna Nicole's partner, Howard K. Stern, is listed as Dannielee's father on her birth certificate, there are three other potential fathers. These men include photographer Larry Birkhead, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, and even Smith's late husband, J Howard Marshall. (Anna Nicole's sister, Donna Hogan, has said that Anna was inseminated with Marshall's sperm.)

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.

A paramedic with the Hollywood Fire Rescue Department told WTVJ-TV that Ms. Smith was not breathing when he and other rescue workers arrived in her suite, and that they had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to restore her heartbeat.

A lawyer for Ms. Smith, Ronald Rale, said she had complained of flulike symptoms earlier in the week and was “run down” from her recent troubles, including the death of her 20-year-old son and a paternity suit over her infant daughter. Mr. Rale would not say why she was visiting Florida, but a spokesman for the hotel, a flashy, sprawling complex on Seminole Indian land, said Ms. Smith had stayed there several times since it opened in 2004.

The product of a hardscrabble Texas girlhood, Ms. Smith, at least in her mature years, was obtrusively voluptuous and almost preternaturally blonde. A ninth-grade dropout, she rose quickly from life as a small-town wife and mother to a high-profile career as a topless dancer; pinup; model; film actress; reality-show star; clothing designer; product endorser; and, briefly but most notably, wife of a tycoon nearly four times her age in a marriage that would eventually propel her to the United States Supreme Court in a fight over his billion-dollar estate.

For gossip columnists and supermarket tabloids, Ms. Smith’s life provided endless fodder. She often found herself in court, as either the complainant or the defendant. She publicly battled bankruptcy, drug addiction and wild fluctuations in her weight. And she was much in the headlines last fall when, over three days, her second child was born and her first died abruptly.

Ms. Smith was widely known to television viewers as the star of “The Anna Nicole Show,” broadcast on the E! network from 2002 to 2004. The show chronicled the minutiae of its heroine’s daily life, which showed her on visits to her dentists and giving Prozac to her dog. 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.)

She appeared in several movies, among them “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) and “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” (1994). Her other cinematic credits include “Playboy Video Playmate Calendar” (1993); and “Playboy’s 50th Anniversary Celebration” (2003).

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. Married life for Ms. Smith was a bounteous stream of clothes and jewelry.

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. Recently, Anna Nicole's life has been rife with tragedy. On September 10, 2006, her son, Daniel, died while visiting his mother and newborn sister at a 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.He reportedly was killed by a combination of Lexapro, methadone, and Zoloft.

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.