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A US federal appeals court ruled Friday that Anna Nicole Smith's heirs will not receive a penny of the more than 300 million dollars she claimed to her billionaire husband's inheritance.
The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled in favor of E. Pierce Marshall, the son of Texas oil tycoon Howard Marshall, whom the late Playboy centerfold married in 1994 after meeting him while working at a strip club. She was 26 at the time and he was 89.
Marshall died in 1995 after a 14-month marriage, sparking a prolonged legal battle over his 1.6-billion-dollar estate.
At the time of her death from an accidental drug overdose in a Florida hotel room in February 2007, Smith's will -- which had not been updated -- left all her wealth to her son Daniel, who had died six months earlier, with attorney Howard Stern assigned as the estate executor.
The person who had stood to gain from her estate was Smith's daughter Dannielynn Hope, born in September 2006, who was at the center of a court battle over a fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
When Smith died, the identity of the girl's father was unknown.
Stern, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband Frederic van Anhalt and celebrity photographer Larry Birkhead all filed paternity suits claiming they were the father.
Birkhead was determined to be the girl's father. It remains unclear whether he will pursue further litigation.
London's Royal Opera House announced Wednesday that it would stage the world premiere of an opera about Smith's life in February 2011.
The work is by Mark-Anthony Turnage and writer Richard Thomas, who co-created the controversial production "Jerry Springer: The Opera."
A 2007 autopsy found that Smith's death -- a worldwide media sensation at the time -- was due to a lethal cocktail of anti-anxiety medication, methadone, antibiotics and other prescription drugs.
It came just months after her son, 20-year-old Daniel, died from an overdose in the Bahamas in September 2006.
