Ever heard that old saying about those who burn twice as bright burn out twice as fast? There are many celebs this saying could apply to, but few more than Anna Nicole Smith. She went from a relatively unknown person to an overnight celebrity. However, shortly after she had largely passed out of our pop culture consciousness, she accidentally overdosed and died.
Given the sudden death of someone who had led such a tumultuous life, we didn’t think Anna Nicole Smith’s story could get much sadder. But the tale of how she lost her wealth–basically, a tale of her financial rise and fall–is the embodiment of modern tragedy.
Don’t believe us? Keep reading to discover the entire sad story of how Anna Nicole Smith lost her wealth!
The original rags to riches story
At first, the story of Anna Nicole Smith was an inspiring one. She had already dropped out of high school by age 18 and was a single mother trying to raise her child by working at a strip club. While at this job, she met the 86-year-old billionaire Howard Marshall. This was her future husband, though they didn’t get married right away.
In fact, they didn’t get married until 1994, when Smith was a celebrity in her own right. By then, she was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year, had her own reality show, and even made cameos in major films like Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult. Given her own self-made success and the fact that she was married to a billionaire, it looked like Smith had her entire life ahead of her.
Unfortunately, her tragedy was just beginning.
A nasty surprise after her husband died
When a young model and actor marries a geriatric billionaire, many people assume that she is doing so trying to get his money. Now, we won’t pretend to understand the mind and heart of Anna Nicole Smith when she married Howard Marshall and whether she was truly a gold-digger. Nonetheless, once he passed away, we had the same assumption that Smith did: namely, that she’d be the recipient of his awesome fortune.
That’s when she got the nastiest possible surprise: her husband had left her out of the will entirely. This might not have been so bad if Smith was great at managing the money she was bringing in from her own ventures, but she wasn’t. Therefore, Smith eventually went from living the life of the ultra-wealthy to having to file bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy and financial mismanagement
While Anna Nicole Smith received nothing from the death of her billionaire husband, she was still doing better than most of us could ever hope to do. For example, she pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from things like her reality show, and she had previously gotten millions of dollars worth of jewels from her husband. All in all, you might think that she would be financially set.
Unfortunately, Smith was terrible at managing her finances, and that’s putting it kindly. She would forget to pay things like utility bills or taxes, and she managed to lose $2 million worth of jewelry. She eventually had to file for bankruptcy, and the official examiner who spoke with her described someone who was constantly slurring words, barely able to walk, and would forget what she was talking about mid-conversation.
A surprise windfall for Anna Nicole Smith
After filing for bankruptcy, it looked like Anna Nicole Smith was financially finished. That’s when she got a windfall that nobody could have foreseen. Over the years, she had been in and out of court trying to get money from her dead husband’s son, Pierce Marshall. And in the year 2000, this paid off big time when a judge awarded her a cool $450 million from Howard Marshall’s estate.
This made Smith very emotional, and according to ABC News, she took the opportunity to praise her husband and implicitly ask for more money. “No one ever took care of me in my whole life, and this man did and I loved him for that,” she said. “I hope it ends up like my husband wanted it to. I hope it ends up that I get everything that he wanted me to have.”
Sadly, things didn’t work out like she was hoping. And the world was about to lose one of its biggest stars.
A surprise lawsuit and tragic death
At one point, Anna Nicole Smith got his with a lawsuit over her alleged refusal to star in Vince Offer’s movie The Underground Comedy Movie with Joey Buttafuco. He sued her, but that was small potatoes compared to what her deceased husband’s son did. In 2002, a court reduced Smith’s previous $450 million award to only $88 million, and Pierce Marshall vowed to legally fight to keep her from even receiving that fractional amount.
Soon, though, that legal fight didn’t matter. In 2007, Smith died from an accidental overdose, leaving behind a legion of grieving fans. All of them wondered the same thing: how someone like Smith, who had tried so hard and gained so much, could fall into so much disgrace and ruin.