Anna Nicole Smith Opera Set

It’s an adaptation so unlikely it actually makes sense: The story of Anna Nicole Smith’s life is moving from the E! True Hollywood Story stable to the opera house. Mark-Anthony Turnage, composer of two previously well-received operas, is writing about the former model’s marriage to 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall, her battle for his inheritance, and the distressing death of her son, to be set on stage in 2011, writes The Guardian. “It is not just a documentary about her, but a parable about celebrity and what it does to people," said Covent Garden’s director of opera, "It is a very sad story—a larger-than-life American story, as was Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. It will be a slice of our times—of America in the pre-Obama days."