After the Anna Nicole Smith opera, whose turn is it next? David Beckham’s?

So Anna Nicole Smith — the poor, talentless Texan girl who by virtue of the most enormous bosom became a stripper in a Houston clip joint and married one of its regular customers, a wheelchair-bound oil billionaire 63 years her senior — is to be the subject of a new opera that will receive its first performance at the Royal Opera House next year. The opera is an all-British effort, with music by Mark-Anthony Turnage and libretto by Richard Thomas, one of the creators of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Springer, widely attacked as blasphemous, was a sprightly satire on American trash culture, which ended with God and the Devil battling over the soul of the famous talk show host. But Anna Nicole, as the new opera is called, looks set to be more of a traditional operatic tragedy, ending with its heroine’s early death at the age of 39. Details of the plot have not been revealed; but its librettist has been quoted as saying: ‘Anna Nicole Smith’s tragic life is a classic American tale about celebrity, and the price you pay for trying to escape your roots.’

This seems a little unfair on Anna Nicole, whose roots were of a kind that anyone would want to escape. Born in Houston into a poor working-class family, with parents who were divorced when she was two, and a mother who subsequently married four more times, she dropped out of school in her teens to get a job as a fast-food waitress in Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken restaurant in the obscure Texas town of Mexia. There, aged 17, she married a 16-year-old cook, Billy Smith: and next year they had a son, Daniel, only to separate shortly afterwards. It was an unpromising start for a woman who had always dreamt of becoming famous and, as a girl, had kept a picture of Marilyn Monroe on her bedroom wall.