The fine line between opera and soap opera just got
blurrier.
Britain's august Royal Opera said on Thursday it was planning a
show based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith, the model and stripper
who married an octogenarian oil tycoon, starred in her own TV show
and died of a drug overdose in 2007.
The company says the show will have music by respected British
composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. The libretto is by Richard Thomas,
co-creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera, an earlier merger
of highbrow and lowbrow culture. It is due to run in the Royal
Opera's 2011 season.
The company's director of opera, Elaine Padmore, told The
Guardian newspaper the show "is not going to be tawdry; it is
going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad".
"It is not just a documentary about her, but a parable about
celebrity and what it does to people," she said.
Smith was Playboy's Playmate of the Year in 1993, and
the next year married 89-year-old J Howard Marshall II. After his
death the following year, she fought a protracted legal battle with
his son over his estimated $US500 million ($761.85 million)
fortune.
Smith died at 39 in February 2007, five months after the death
of her 20-year-old son from her first marriage.
Daniel Smith died of an accidental overdose in the Bahamas
hospital room where his mother had days earlier given birth to a
daughter.
-AP