Anna Nicole Smith dead

ANNA Nicole Smith, the small-town Texas girl turned Playboy Playmate who became a tabloid fixture while fighting all the way to the US Supreme Court over the estate of her elderly billionaire husband, has died in Florida at the age of 39.

Smith, a statuesque blonde who also gained fame as an model for Guess jeans, died at a local hospital shortly after she was reported needing medical help at her Florida hotel room by a private nurse, police said.

Authorities said an autopsy would be conducted to determine the cause of death.Her sudden death came just five months after Smith's 20-year-old son, Daniel Smith, died in the Bahamas three days after the birth of her daughter.

"I can confirm that she is deceased. It's as shocking to me as to you guys," her attorney, Ronald Rale, said. "I don't know anything further. (Her lawyer and husband) Howard (K. Stern) obviously is speechless and grieving."

Seminole tribal fire rescue and Hollywood fire rescue workers tried to revive her at her hotel, said Michael Bloom, president of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

She was taken to Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood at 2.10pm, local time, and died there, police said.Smith had been ordered to have her five-month-old baby girl undergo a paternity test as part of a lawsuit by an ex-boyfriend, Larry Birkhead.

Birkhead sued Smith in October, demanding she have the paternity test because he believed he was the father of the girl. Smith had said her lawyer, Howard K. Stern, was the father of the baby.

Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan and raised in the small Texas town of Mexia, 130km south of Dallas. She grew up emulating screen legend Marilyn Monroe. She met elderly oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall while dancing at a Houston strip club and married him in 1994, when she was 26 and he was 89.

Marshall died the following year and Smith spent much of the following decade battling members of his family over his estate. In May 2006 the US Supreme Court ruled that Smith could pursue her case in federal court.

Smith, who modelled Guess jeans, was named Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Year in 1993 and had film roles the following year in The Hudsucker Proxy and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.

[Source]