The actor and model lived a life of much-publicized excess but a new Netflix documentary provides a more rounded idea of who she really was
In the recent wave of documentaries demanding justice for the tragic blondes of the 1990s – Britney Spears, Princess Diana and Pamela Anderson among them – it’s unsurprising to find a new film about Anna Nicole Smith next in the queue.
Anna Nicole: You Don’t Know Me, a Netflix production directed by Ursula Macfarlane, revisits the life of the titular model and Playboy centerfold best known for marrying an octogenarian billionaire, then very publicly losing it all; in 2007, she was found dead in a Hollywood, Florida, Hard Rock hotel at the young age of 39, having taken a toxic mixture of methadone, Valium and a variety of sedatives. Diverging from the precedents set by the Britney and Diana films, however, this new documentary treats Smith less as a powerless victim of the media than the savvy protagonist of her own story. “She was a hustler,” Macfarlane tells the Guardian. “She made things happen on her own terms.”
