Anna Nicole Smith: Husband, Inheritance, Daughter and Estate

Born: November 28, 1967 · Married J. Howard Marshall II: June 27, 1994 · Daughter born: September 7, 2006 · Son died: September 10, 2006 · Died: February 8, 2007 · Age at death: 39

Ten rows, one pattern: the marriage, the will, and the deaths all clustered into a short window, which is why the documents and the tabloids never matched.

Who was Anna Nicole Smith’s old husband?

The man behind the question was J. Howard Marshall II, a wealthy Texas oilman. Anna married him in 1994, and he died about 14 months later, leaving a will that gave her nothing — the opening move in a fight that would run for more than a decade.

Who was J. Howard Marshall II?

• A Texas oilman whose fortune became the center of the dispute.
• The husband Anna married in 1994, when she was 26.
• The author of a will that left nearly all of his money to his son.

Marshall’s wealth made the marriage tabloid material; his will made it a legal case. The two facts kept feeding each other for years.

How old was Anna Nicole Smith when she married?

• Anna was 26; Marshall was 89.
• They married on June 27, 1994.
• Marshall died on August 4, 1995, roughly 14 months after the wedding (The San Diego Union-Tribune (California newspaper)).

The age gap explains the headlines. The 14-month window explains the lawsuit: Marshall was gone less than a year and a half after the vows, while the legal question of who got his money was just getting started.

Why did the marriage trigger litigation?

• Marshall’s will left nearly all of his money to E. Pierce Marshall and nothing to Smith.
• Anna claimed Marshall had promised her more than $300 million, plus roughly $7 million in cash and gifts (The San Diego Union-Tribune (California newspaper)).
• The resulting dispute ran from state probate court to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Put simply, one side had the will; the other side had a memory of a promise. Courts spent years deciding which one counted.

Did Anna Nicole Smith get any money from her late husband?

What did J. Howard Marshall II’s will actually say?

• It left nearly all of his estate to his son E. Pierce Marshall.
• It left nothing to Anna Nicole Smith.
• It did not name her in any trust or inheritance provision.

That document was the estate plan. Everything Anna received later came from a legal claim, not from being named in the will.

How did the Marshall v. Marshall case reach the Supreme Court?

• Anna’s legal team argued she was entitled to a share of the estate.
• In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed her claim to proceed in a case known as Marshall v. Marshall.
• In 2011, the Court ruled against her estate, ending the claim.

The case reached the Supreme Court twice. The 2006 ruling let the claim move forward; the 2011 ruling settled the money question: no $300 million payout.

Did Anna Nicole Smith receive an inheritance before she died?

• No court had finalized an award to Anna before her death in February 2007.
• Her $300 million claim was still pending when she died.
• Her personal estate at the time of death was estimated at roughly $2 million (Encyclopaedia Britannica (reference publisher)).

The honest answer: Anna did not receive a Marshall inheritance before she died. The legal claim was still alive, but the paychecks from Howard Marshall’s fortune never started.

What this means: the $300 million figure in headlines was a claim, not a check. Anna died in 2007 with the case unresolved and her own estate valued at a fraction of what the tabloids repeated.

The distinction: the Marshall claim was a lawsuit; the trust for Dannielynn was a separate estate matter.

Who inherited Howard Marshall’s money?

Who is E. Pierce Marshall?

• He was J. Howard Marshall II’s son.
• He inherited most of the estate under the will.
• He died in 2006, before Anna’s claim was resolved.

E. Pierce Marshall spent years defending his inheritance. His death in 2006 did not end the fight — his widow, Elaine T. Marshall, stepped in as the estate’s advocate in the continuing litigation.

Was Anna Nicole Smith named in the will?

• No.
• The will left nearly everything to E. Pierce Marshall and nothing to Smith.
• Anna’s 2006 Supreme Court win concerned the right to make a claim, not the contents of the will.

Being allowed to sue is not the same as being named in a will. The distinction is the whole case in miniature.

What happened to the estate after Pierce Marshall died?

• The dispute continued with Elaine T. Marshall on the other side.
• In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled against Anna’s estate, ending the claim.
• The ruling left Anna’s estate without the $300 million it had sought.

The 2011 decision is the real ending of the inheritance story: the Marshall fortune stayed in the Marshall family. The money did not go to Anna or to her heirs.

The implication: the fortune stayed where the will put it. The appeals changed the timeline, but they never changed the destination.

Does Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter have any money?

What happened to Anna Nicole Smith’s estate?

• Anna’s 2001 will was written before Dannielynn’s birth and named her deceased son Daniel as beneficiary (ABA Journal (American Bar Association publication)).
• In March 2008, a Los Angeles court named Dannielynn as Anna’s sole heir.
• The court’s heirship ruling treated the estate plan as not intending to disinherit a later-born child (ABA Journal (American Bar Association publication)).

The legal logic matters here: because the 2001 will predated Dannielynn, the court had to decide whether a later-born child was intentionally excluded. The ruling said no — Dannielynn inherited in place of the son who had died.

Does Dannielynn Birkhead receive income from a trust?

• The court established a trust to hold Dannielynn’s inheritance.
• Howard K. Stern and Larry Birkhead were identified as co-trustees (People (celebrity news magazine)).
• The trust exists — but its value was never disclosed in the reporting.

Co-trustees meant two people had to sign off on decisions affecting Dannielynn’s inheritance. That structure is documented; the balance is not.

Is Dannielynn Birkhead a public figure?

• She is the daughter of Anna Nicole Smith and Larry Birkhead.
• Larry Birkhead became her custodial parent after Anna’s death.
• He has kept her out of the public eye.

Dannielynn inherited the family’s legal history but not its public profile. There are no court filings or interviews laying out her day-to-day life, and no official source has published the value of her trust.

Why this matters: the trust answers “does she have money?” with a legal yes, but the dollar figure is the missing piece that every net worth estimate tries to fill with guesses.

What is Dannielynn Birkhead’s net worth?

Why are celebrity net worth estimates unreliable here?

• No official public record confirms Dannielynn’s net worth.
• The assets in her trust were never disclosed.
• Estimates tend to recycle assumptions about the Marshall fortune.

The Marshall fortune is the wrong baseline. That claim failed in 2011, so any net worth estimate built on it is built on a case the courts already rejected.

Who manages Dannielynn Birkhead’s money?

• Two co-trustees were named: Howard K. Stern and Larry Birkhead.
• The trust was set up by a Los Angeles court in 2008, not by a private family deal.
• Management details beyond the co-trustee names are not public.

A court-created trust with named trustees is the most concrete fact in this section. Everything after it — the balance, the income, the payout schedule — is unconfirmed.

Has Dannielynn Birkhead spoken publicly about her finances?

• No.
• She has not given interviews about money.
• The reporting that exists stops at the trust’s existence, not its balance.

The silence is consistent with a family that chose privacy over publicity. The side effect is that the financial record ends where the most interesting question begins.

The trade-off: her privacy is real, and it is the reason the number doesn’t exist. The less she appears in public records, the more the calculators fill the gap with assumptions.

How rich is Larry Birkhead?

What does Larry Birkhead do today?

• He is a photographer by profession.
• He was confirmed as Dannielynn’s father by DNA testing in April 2007.
• After Anna’s death, he became Dannielynn’s custodial parent.

Those three facts — photographer, confirmed father, custodial parent — are the documented part of his profile. Most of what else circulates about his income is not backed by official records.

How did Larry Birkhead become Dannielynn’s father?

• DNA testing in April 2007 identified him as Dannielynn’s biological father.
• The testing came after Anna’s death.
• The court later treated him as Dannielynn’s custodial parent.

Paternity was not assumed; it was established by DNA. That made Larry Birkhead the surviving parent who could raise Dannielynn, and later a co-trustee of her inheritance.

What is Larry Birkhead’s net worth?

• No public document confirms Larry Birkhead’s net worth.
• His income from photography and media work is not itemized in any official record.
• Published estimates are guesses.

The difference between Larry Birkhead and his daughter’s case is that he never became the center of the estate litigation. He was the custodial father, not a claimant fighting over Howard Marshall’s fortune.

The pattern: the more a person’s life touches the tabloid era, the more numbers get attached to them without evidence. Larry Birkhead’s net worth is one of those numbers: widely repeated, never documented.

When did Anna Nicole Smith give birth to her daughter?

Was Anna Nicole Smith in the room when her son died?

• Daniel died on September 10, 2006, in the Bahamas.
• That was three days after Dannielynn’s birth (Encyclopaedia Britannica (reference publisher)).
• Whether Anna was in the hospital room at the moment of his death is not established in the confirmed record.

Daniel was 20. His death, three days after Dannielynn’s birth, became one of the most replayed stories of the case — and one of the least documented.

How old was Daniel when he died?

• He was 20 years old.
• He died in 2006, five months before Anna.
• Anna died February 8, 2007, when Dannielynn was about five months old.

The dates are tight, and that tightness is why the case stayed in the news: a birth, a death, and a mother’s death inside five months.

Who was named Dannielynn’s father after Anna’s death?

• Larry Birkhead was identified by DNA testing in April 2007.
• The testing resolved a public dispute over paternity.
• Howard K. Stern was later named a co-trustee of Dannielynn’s inheritance.

Paternity was settled by science, not by testimony. That made the family structure clear even while the financial structure stayed opaque.

The catch: Dannielynn’s birth, Daniel’s death, and Anna’s death all fit into five months. The paternity question was settled only after Anna was gone — by DNA, not by any public statement from her.

The Anna Nicole Smith inheritance timeline

Eight dates, one pattern: the people at the center kept dying before the courts finished talking about their money.

What to watch: the sensational dates — the birth, the death, the funeral coverage — all cluster in 2006 and 2007. The legal dates run much longer, which is why the case took so long to unwind.

What’s confirmed vs. what’s still unclear

Why the split matters: every tabloid headline picked one side of this list. The confirmed column is the legal record; the unclear column is everything else the coverage filled in.

Voices on the case

“Rich (sporadically) and litigious (chronically).”

— The New York Times, Anna Nicole Smith obituary, 2007

“Smith died from an accidental overdose in 2007.”

— Reelz (true-crime TV network), Autopsy: Re-Examined

The upshot: the obituary captured the public image — rich sporadically, litigious chronologically — while the documentary states the medical outcome. Neither answers the money question; that’s why the court record matters more.

The final word: who actually got the money

The Marshall fortune stayed with the Marshall family. Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007 with her $300 million claim unresolved, and the Supreme Court ended it in 2011. Her own estate, estimated at roughly $2 million, is what created the trust for Dannielynn — a trust whose value was never made public. For anyone trying to estimate Dannielynn’s future, the choice is straightforward: trust what courts recorded, or keep chasing a payout the Supreme Court already rejected.

Related reading

• Anna Nicole Smith: Inheritance, Son’s Death, Daughter Today
• Anna Nicole Smith: Fame, Tragedy & Life of Dannielynn Birkhead

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