Anna Nicole Smith: The Opera
Updated on 12 February 2009
The Royal Opera House is planning to stage an opera based on the tragic life of US glamour model Anna Nicole Smith.
Mark-Anthony Turnage is writing the story which will be staged in London's Covent Garden in 2011. Richard Thomas, whose credits include the controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera, will provide the libretto.
Director of opera Elaine Padmore said the work was not just a documentary about Smith, but a parable about celebrity - and the former Playmate of the Year certainly provides good subject matter.
Early on in her life, at the age of 17, she married an elderly oil billionaire J Howard Marshall, who was more than 60 years her senior.
She went on to become a successful glamour model, appearing in numerous editions of Playboy magazine, and even appeared in some some films, including Naked Gun 33â ": The Final Insult.
But it all went wrong in February 2007, when Nicole Smith, 39, was found unresponsive in her hotel room in Hollywood, Florida, and was later pronounced dead.
Her death came just five months after that of her 20-year-old son, Daniel.
The work is in its early stages, but Ms Padmore added: "It is not going to be tawdry, it is going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad. In broad outline, it will tell the story of her life, the people who influenced her, her progress...
"Clearly the story is about a woman who met an ancient gentleman in a wheelchair, but it's not going to be a straight narrative; choices have been made about significant moments, selecting which incidents in her life are to be built up."
She said it was a very sad story - "a larger-than-life American story, it was Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. It will be a slice of our times - of America in the pre-Obama days".
© Independent Television News Limited 2009. All rights reserved.
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