Netflix tip of the day: Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me
Enjoying your day off and planning to just hang out on the couch? I get it. Rightly so. In that case, I have a really good Netflix tip for you today: the documentary about Anna Nicole Smith. When she was frequently in the media, I was still very young (I was in elementary school), so I understood very little of it all. In 1994, she married J. Howard Marshall, who had billions in his account. There was a 63-year age difference between him and Anna Nicole Smith: she was 27, he was 89.
They met when he visited a strip club where she performed in 1991. Not long after, they got married, and because of the significant age difference (and his enormous fortune), Anna Nicole Smith was primarily portrayed in the news as a gold digger. Throughout her life, she always claimed to have truly loved him, up until his death. That death likely came a bit earlier than they hoped: he died in 1995 at the age of 90. And Anna Nicole Smith was not mentioned in his will and thus received nothing.
She contested this until her (much too early death); the case even reached the Supreme Court. She did this together with a son of Marshall, Howard III, who had been disinherited.
But even before all these lawsuits, for her and before Marshall's death, Anna Nicole Smith lived a tumultuous life. Enough reason for Netflix to dive deep into that, resulting in the documentary Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me. You get a glimpse into her childhood up to her rebellious teenage years, it shows how she became a mother at a young age to her son Daniel, the meeting with Marshall, and everything that followed, up to her passing. She died in 2007 at the age of 39 from an overdose.
Honestly, I knew very little about Anna Nicole Smith's life, but I watched this doc in one go. A genuinely interesting documentary, where I am also repeatedly amazed at how some people grow up in the United States: it can really be such a different world than the one we know.
Anyway, this is again a nice recommendation. There is actually a lot more hidden behind that girl who was portrayed as a gold digger in the media at the age of 27.
Image: Netflix
