Anna Nicole Smith at Royal Opera House

The life of Anna Nicole Smith, the glamour model best known for marrying a billionaire 63 years her senior and who died of a combined drug overdose two years ago aged 39, is to be transformed into an opera. It will be staged at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 2010.

One of the most celebrated names is British contemporary music, Mark-Anthony Turnage, is scoring the music, reports the Guardian, and the libretto will be provided by Richard Thomas, who was the co-creator of the controversial Jerry Springer the Opera.

Sounds tacky? Not according to Elaine Padmore, Covent Garden's director of opera. "It is not going to be a horrible, sleazy evening. It is not going to be tawdry; it is 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."

There will be no shortage of material. Smith, born Vickie Lynn Hogan in 1967, dropped out of her Texas high school, married a fellow worker at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken. She then transformed herself, with the help of breast enhancement, into a glamour model and found fame as Playboy's Playmate of the Year in 1993.

Her real claim to fame, however, was her marriage to J Howard Marshall when he was 89, and she 26. After his death she pursued what she argued was her share of her inheritance through the courts, fought by her late husband's son.

During this time, she appeared alongside jailbird O J Simpson in one of the Naked Gun movies and briefly had her own reality TV programme, The Anna Nicole Smith Show. But then it all went wrong. Three days after the birth of her daughter, of no certan father, her 20-year-old son by her first marriage died. Five months later she was dead herself.

Padmore, who compares the story to the plot of Donizetti's classic, Lucia di Lammermoor, adds: "It is not just a documentary about her, but a parable about celebrity and what it does to people."

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