Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me – An almost unbearably unhappy tale

Anna Nicole Smith was the quintessential 1990s celebrity: a Playmate of the Year just as raunch culture peaked, a model for Guess jeans, an early adopter of reality TV and, ultimately, a calamitous superstar of the 24-hour news cycle.

Born Vickie Lynn Hogan and raised between Houston and the small Texas town of Mexia, Smith flunked out of high school as a freshman, married a Crispy Fried Chicken colleague and gave birth to her son, Daniel, while still in her teens. Relatives recall a beautiful, sunny girl who was dogged by male admirers long before she was famous.

With dreams of a modelling career and hopes to provide for her young son, Smith packed up and left for Hollywood. She landed with a bang, appearing on billboards, in magazines and in the Coen brothers film The Hudsucker Proxy. Archive footage in Ursula Macfarlane’s documentary shows Smith considering rival offers from The Mask and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. (She plumped for the latter, as the producers of The Mask were offering a meagre $50,000.)

Smith’s personal life was tumultuous and very public, as exemplified by her marriage to J Howard Marshall II, an 89-year-old billionaire. Marshall died just over a year after their marriage, leading to a legal battle over his estate that lasted for years (and generations).

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Various allies assemble here to insist that Smith was no gold-digger and that she and Marshall cared deeply for one another. His pining unanswered phone messages tell another story, but by that time Smith was suffering from chronic pain, leaky breast implants, far too much scrutiny and methadone dependency.

There are fascinating Faustian exchanges between Smith and the paparazzi and an illuminating closing chat with her mother in which the poignantly Marilyn Monroe-obsessed star insists that sadness sells. That philosophy would become a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy as Smith’s very tabloid-friendly tragedy played out.

[ Marilyn Monroe: Assaulted by a Hollywood mogul, killed by the Kennedys? ]

Macfarlane, whose previous credits include the 2017 Weinstein exposé Untouchable and Charlie Hebdo: 3 Days That Shook Paris, works hard to humanise a woman who was so often depicted as a cartoon. Her hangers-on were legion, yet when catastrophe struck she was attended to by her lawyer and crying for her bodyguard, Momo.

There are few reveals, but narrative restraint is commendable in the telling of this almost unbearably unhappy tale.

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me is on limited release from Friday, May 12th and on Netflix from Tuesday, May 16th