The Unique Life of Anna Nicole Smith in 20 Photos

Anna Nicole Smith took the world by storm in record time, winning the Playmate of the Year title in 1993, just one year after joining the magazine.

Before changing her name, Vickie Lynn Marshall married Billy Wayne Smith and had a son, Daniel, in 1986. In less than a decade, she'd be pretty much everywhere.

In the '90s, during her peak of fame, she went back to her hometown and high school to show everyone where she was from.

She was quickly rising to fame, and she replaced none other than Claudia Schiffer in an iconic advertising campaign for Guess Jeans, featuring black and white photos.

She was compared with Jayne Mansfield and other femme fatales, so many of her photo shoots tried to recreate those that came before her.

She was, of course, compared with Marilyn Monroe, and decided to own it. Some people think she was like a modern-day Marilyn, not only for her looks, but because of the way she was treated by the media, too.

She married petroleum tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, and controversies started to pile up. She was accused of being a gold digger, and her reputation started taking hits from all fronts.

Anna Nicole Smith was also part of an iconic H&M ad campaign. These ads had to be banned from the streets of Norway and Sweden because they were causing traffic jams and accidents.

Every brand wanted to sign her while she was thriving, because there was nobody with that presence at the time. She initiated her first lawsuit against New York magazine in 1994 and was part of many more in the coming years.

J. Howard Marshall died a year after he married Anna Nicole Smith. While he had promised her and his son part of his state, he didn't include them in his will. The model and actress had to go to court many times for more than a decade due to different rulings in her favor and against her. In the middle of everything, she had to file for bankruptcy, which only made things worse.

None of that stopped her from being pretty much anywhere, rocking her looks.

Wherever there were celebrities, she was there, stealing all the flashes.

Did we mention she was everywhere?

She really was the moment.

While she never revealed much about her sexual orientation, people close to her said her sexuality was pretty fluid, and she had lovers from all parts of the spectrum.

She was part of the Naked Gun franchise, playing a femme fatale with a transphobic twist that wasn't that bad at the time.

In 2005, she was still at the top, getting even more movie roles and ad campaigns than ever.

In 2003, she became the spokesperson for TrimSpa, a dietary supplement designed for weight loss she had reportedly used to lose 69 pounds. The company was later sued in a class-action lawsuit alleging that the marketing was false.

This is one of Anna Nicole Smith's last photos. She's with her son, Daniel Wayne Smith, and her newborn daughter, Dannielynn. By that time, she had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and drug addiction. On top of that, rumors spread that she was involved in a sexual relationship with her son, and that he was Dannielynn's father. The matter was resolved years later, when Anna Nicole Smith had already passed.

Anna Nicole Smith died on February 8, 2007, at 39 years old, five months after her daughter's birth. Her son Daniel had died just a few days after Dannielynn's birth, of a drug overdose in the hospital room where Smith was staying. They were buried together.