Not quite Madam Butterfly, The Fairy Princess or Carmen, but its looking increasingly likely that the life and times of the actress, sex symbol and model, Anna Nicole Smith, could soon be made into…….. an opera!

Well, her life certainly did resemble an unbelievable drama so with that in mind, Mark-Anthony Turnage is said to be writing the story of Anna’s life which is expected to be staged in London’s Covent Garden in 2011.

The Director of opera Elaine Padmore told UK newspaper, The Guardian, “It’s not going to be tawdry, it’s going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad. In broad outline, it will tell the story of her life, the people who influenced her, her progress. Clearly the story is about a woman who met an ancient gentleman in a wheelchair, but it’s not going to be a straight narrative; choices have been made about significant moments, selecting which incidents in her life are to be built up.”

Padmore said. ‘the work wouldn’t just be a documentary about the Playboy model, but a parable about celebrity. Describing it as “a larger-than-life American story, it was Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West. It will be a slice of our times - of America in the pre-Barack Obama days’.

Anna’s life became the focus of media attention in 1994 when she married the aging multi-millionaire oil tycoon J Howard Marshall, who was more than 60 years her senior.

Following her heady days of TV appearances, movies, Playboy magazine photo shoots and several high profile relationships, Anna’s life turned to tragedy when, at 37 years old after giving birth to her baby daughter, Dannielynn in September 2006, she lost her 20 year old son Daniel and eventually, hiding her pain behind drugs, she accidentally took her own life on February 8^th 2007 while living in the Bahamas.