Anna Nicole Smith: Death, Son, Daughter and Inheritance

Few celebrity stories carry as much legal baggage as Anna Nicole Smith’s — a life that ended in 2007 with a five-month-old daughter and an inheritance fight that outlived her (Encyclopaedia Britannica (reference publisher)). The official cause of death, accidental combined-drug intoxication, was one of the few clean answers in a saga that kept producing court filings and tabloid headlines, and this piece separates confirmed facts from open questions — including what her daughter Dannielynn is doing today (ABC News (news network)).

Born: November 28, 1967 ·
Died: February 8, 2007 ·
Age at death: 39 ·
Daughter’s age when Anna died: Five months old ·
Son’s death: Daniel Smith died in 2006 at age 20

Eight facts, one pattern: every fork in Anna’s life led to another legal case.

What happened with Anna Nicole Smith?

Anna Nicole Smith was the stage name of Vickie Lynn Hogan, a Texas single mother who became Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1993 (Wikipedia (community-maintained encyclopedia)). The fame was immediate. In 1994, she married J. Howard Marshall II, an 89-year-old oil tycoon; when he died a year later, the will left nearly the entire estate to his son E. Pierce Marshall — and nothing to Anna (6abc Philadelphia (ABC affiliate)). That document turned a celebrity marriage into a federal case that outlasted her.

Anna’s challenge moved through Texas probate court and federal bankruptcy court, and the dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court. She was still litigating when she died in 2007; her estate kept fighting after her death. The final Supreme Court ruling in 2011, Stern v. Marshall, gave her estate a procedural win on jurisdiction — but no share of the Marshall fortune (ABC News (news network)).

What happened after Dannielynn was born in 2006?

• September 7, 2006: Dannielynn was born in the Bahamas.
• September 10, 2006: Daniel Smith, Anna’s 20-year-old son, died in the Bahamas (Encyclopaedia Britannica (reference publisher)).
• February 8, 2007: Anna Nicole Smith died at 39.
• DNA testing later confirmed Larry Birkhead as Dannielynn’s biological father (Business Insider (business publication)).

The sequence matters: Daniel died three days after his half-sister was born, and Anna was gone five months later. Howard K. Stern, Anna’s lawyer and partner, was named on the birth certificate, but DNA testing would show he was not the biological father (Business Insider (business publication)). The paternity fight ended when Larry Birkhead was confirmed — and Birkhead, not Stern, raised Dannielynn.

The pattern: Anna’s fame made the legal fight visible, but the law moved on its own clock — the case outlasted the plaintiff.

Bottom line: Anna Nicole Smith’s stardom collided with a contested will, and the legal fight outlived her by four years. Her estate received nothing from the Marshall fortune.

Why did Anna Nicole Smith pass away?

Anna was found unresponsive in her room at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida, on February 8, 2007. The Broward County medical examiner ruled the death an accident caused by combined drug intoxication; nine prescription drugs were reported in her system (ABC News (news network)). A prescription sedative, chloral hydrate, was identified as the major component of the fatal combination (Encyclopaedia Britannica (reference publisher)). She was 39.

The distinction mattered then and now: the medical examiner did not classify the death as suicide or homicide. That ruling kept the story in civil court — estates, paternity, and appeals — rather than turning it into a criminal case.

Who was with Anna Nicole when she died?

• Howard K. Stern, her lawyer and longtime partner, was part of the hotel scene in the moments before emergency responders arrived.
• Her bodyguard was also present in the immediate aftermath (Business Insider (business publication)).
• Anna was pronounced dead that afternoon; she was 39 years old.

The presence of Stern and the bodyguard fed tabloid speculation for years. The official record, however, stayed fixed: an accidental drug combination, not a crime scene.

How old would Anna Nicole Smith be if she was still alive?

She would be in her late 50s now, which tends to surprise people who picture her as frozen in the 2000s tabloid era. The arithmetic is simple, but it anchors the timeline: she was 39 when she died, her daughter was five months old, and her son’s death was still raw. The question usually comes from the same place as the other long-tail searches — a sense that Anna’s story was cut short before the legal script finished. It was.

How old was Anna Nicole’s baby when she died?

Dannielynn was born September 7, 2006, in the Bahamas. Anna died February 8, 2007. So the answer is about five months old (ABC News (news network)).

That age matters beyond the obvious tragedy — it meant Dannielynn was too young to have any memory of her mother. Her entire knowledge of Anna comes from photos, film, court records, and the people who knew her.

How much money did Anna Nicole’s daughter inherit when she died?

• Anna’s 2001 will named Daniel Smith as her sole beneficiary and Howard K. Stern as executor (Wikipedia (community-maintained encyclopedia)).
• Because the will predated Dannielynn’s birth, it was never amended to name her directly; Anna’s personal estate was estimated at roughly $1 million to $2 million (NationalWorld (news outlet)).
• Through later court proceedings, Dannielynn was recognized as the heir to Anna’s personal estate — not to J. Howard Marshall’s fortune.

The distinction is where this story gets confusing. Anna’s estate was a separate, modest pool of assets built from her own earnings and property. The Marshall estate was the multibillion-dollar target of a separate lawsuit. Dannielynn inherited from the first; the second paid her estate nothing.

For anyone asking “did Anna Nicole’s baby inherit the money”: the money that mattered was Anna’s own, and it was already tied up in court by the time Dannielynn could walk.

Bottom line: Dannielynn was five months old when her mother died, and she later became the heir to Anna’s personal estate — a low seven-figure estate, not the Marshall fortune.

Did Anna Nicole Smith ever get any of her husband’s money?

The short answer is no. J. Howard Marshall II left the bulk of his estate to his son E. Pierce Marshall, and Anna’s fight to overturn that will ran from 1995 until after her death (6abc Philadelphia (ABC affiliate)).

The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice. The second decision, Stern v. Marshall in 2011, ruled that the bankruptcy court had jurisdiction over Anna’s counterclaim — a legal win for her estate, but not a cash award. Anna’s estate ended up with no share of the Marshall fortune (ABC News (news network)).

Why did Anna Nicole Smith inherit nothing?

• Marshall’s will excluded her; nearly the entire estate went to his son.
• Anna argued that her late husband had promised her a significant share and that his son had interfered.
• The courts disagreed on jurisdiction, and the procedural battles consumed the case until the 2011 Supreme Court ruling.
• By then, the plaintiff was Anna’s estate — and the record shows no Marshall payout.

The trade-off: legal persistence kept the case running for 16 years, but it ended with a ruling on jurisdiction, not a check.

Bottom line: Anna Nicole Smith never received Marshall’s money, and neither did her estate. The will — not the marriage — decided where the fortune went.

What caused the death of Anna Nicole Smith’s son Daniel?

Daniel Smith was Anna’s son from her first marriage, and he died in the Bahamas on September 10, 2006, three days after his half-sister Dannielynn was born. He was 20. The official finding was an accidental combination of methadone and antidepressants (Encyclopaedia Britannica (reference publisher)).

Did Anna Nicole have a son that died?

• Yes — Daniel Smith was her son from her first marriage.
• He was born in 1986, before Anna’s Playboy fame.
• He was with Anna in the Bahamas when he died, days after his sister was born.
• The Bahamian inquest ruled the death accidental.

Anna was photographed leaving the morgue days later, and the image became part of the tabloid record. The proximity of Daniel’s death to Dannielynn’s birth is the detail most biographers return to: Anna spent her last five months in grief, not celebration.

The cruel timing: Daniel died three days after Dannielynn’s birth, and Anna was gone five months later. The two events are separate in the medical record, but they are inseparable in her story.

What is Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter doing now?

Dannielynn Birkhead was raised by her father, Larry Birkhead, who took custody after DNA testing confirmed paternity in 2007. She grew up in Kentucky, and Birkhead kept her away from the tabloid cycle that defined her mother’s final years (NationalWorld (news outlet)).

Does Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter have a disability?

• No public medical record, court document, or official statement confirms that Dannielynn has a disability (NationalWorld (news outlet)).
• The claim circulates on social media and message boards, without a primary source to support it.
• Larry Birkhead has addressed the rumor in interviews, describing Dannielynn as healthy and well-adjusted.

Over the years, Dannielynn has appeared with Birkhead at public events in Kentucky, and those appearances now read as the anti-tabloid version of her mother’s red-carpet years. She is Anna’s only surviving biological child.

The pattern: Dannielynn’s life has been the inverse of her mother’s — private, quiet, and documented mostly through court files and a few public photographs.

Timeline

One timeline, one pattern: the dates move from fame to marriage to loss, and the cases kept running after the person at the center stopped being able to control them.

The implication: by the time the Supreme Court ruled, Anna had been dead for four years. The estates fought longer than the woman at the center of them had lived as a public figure.

Two lists separate what the public record holds from what it does not.

Why the split matters: the confirmed list is where the legal record ended; the unclear list is where the tabloid versions usually begin. Anchoring to the first list — not the second — is the difference between a biography and a rumor.

Key quotes and official findings

The cause of death was combined drug intoxication, and the manner of death was accidental.

— Broward County Medical Examiner’s finding, as reported by ABC News (news network)

The Supreme Court’s decision kept Anna Nicole Smith’s counterclaim alive, but the ruling did not hand her estate a share of the Marshall fortune.

— Stern v. Marshall (2011), as summarized by ABC News (news network)

Larry Birkhead has described raising Dannielynn with as much ordinary life as possible, away from the attention that followed her mother.

— Larry Birkhead, as reported by NationalWorld (news outlet)

Anna Nicole Smith’s story never really ended — it changed plaintiffs. Dannielynn carried her mother’s estate forward, while the Marshall fortune stayed where the will put it. For anyone sorting through the headlines, the distinction is simple: Anna’s estate was modest, Marshall’s was enormous, and the two never merged. For Dannielynn, the consequence is clear: her inheritance is a family history and a small personal estate, not the Marshall billions — and the court record backs that up.

Frequently asked questions

Related reading

• Anna Nicole Smith Facts: Life, Death, and Marshall Inheritance
• Anna Nicole Smith Cause of Death and Estate Battle