The strange, sad story of Anna Nicole Smith is retold in this Netflix documentary by Ursula Macfarlane, who made Untouchable, about Harvey Weinstein. Smith was the former Playboy centrefold and Guess Jeans model who wound up dead of a drug overdose in 2007 at the age of 39, soon after her 20-year-old son had tragically died the same way. There are eerie similarities with the life of Pamela Anderson, also a recent Netflix subject, though Anderson survives and thrives.
Smith was a smalltown Texas girl from a tough background – although she was accused by her mother of manufacturing abuse stories for publicity. She embraced Playboy superstardom, tabloid notoriety and media letching that so easily flipped over into misogynist hate. Like Anderson, Smith used the “blonde” image as a kind of persona or disguise or armour and (as with Anderson) it is strange to see her pre- or non-blonde normality from private photos.
