Jade Goody dies from cancer, aged 27

Sunday, March 22: Jade Goody is dead. Too late to make the covers of the Sunday tabloids that did so much to create her celebrity, the reality television star passed away between 3.0 am and 4.0 am today at her home in Upshire, Essex. Her mother Jackiey Budden, who was at her bedside, said after Goody’s long battle with cancer: "My beautiful daughter is at peace."

Within minutes of the announcement by her publicist Max Clifford, well-wishers were laying floral tributes outside her home. She was 27.

Formally a dental nurse, Goody first came to public attention on the reality TV show Big Brother in 2002 where she was quickly branded a 'pig' on account of her looks and widely ridiculed for her ignorance: she thought the Mona Lisa had been painted by an artist called 'Pistachio' and famously claimed that East Anglia – which she referred to as 'East Angular' – was in a foreign country.

In the years following her eviction from the Big Brother House, Goody became a tabloid personality. Autobiographies, cookbooks, stage appearances, perfumes and ghost-written columns in celebrity magazines followed before she re-entered reality television, this time as a 'celebrity' on 2007's Celebrity Big Brother.
 
While filming the series, Goody became embroiled in a racism row over the bullying of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, whom she referred to as 'Shilpa Poppadom'. Despite the 50,000 recorded complaints about her behaviour, Goody managed to resurrect her career and she and Shetty were even reunited for the Indian reality series Big Boss.

It was during the filming of that series that Goody was told she had cervical cancer. She returned to Britain for treatment, but the disease spread to her liver, bowels and groin, dramatically reducing her chances of survival.
 
As a product of a celebrity obsessed media, Goody's every move was played out in the tabloids after her first appearance on Big Brother. Thanks to Clifford, Goody became a sort of Princess Diana figure, wrote Coline Covington on The First Post. "Under his tutelage, Jade has managed to transform herself from a figure of scandal and ridicule to an icon of heroic suffering."

Also on The First Post, Brendan O'Neill wrote that had Goody been middle class, her cancer would have been more respectfully played out in the broadsheets. As it was, she became the unfortunate victim of "chav cancer".

A month ago, Goody married her boyfriend Jack Tweed, with the celebrity weekly OK! reportedly paying £700,000 for the privilege of exclusive photographs. Goody explained that the money was to help secure the futures of her two sons from a previous relationship, Bobby, five and Freddie, four.

The First Post's columnist Will Self wrote that while he did not begrudge her the fortune she was making from her highly visible death, he declined to take part in the "grotesque sentimentalising of what is little more than a modern freak show".

However, despite the questions raised over the very public way Goody conducted herself in life and death, many in the medical field were grateful that in her final months she brought public attention to the need for cancer screening. Clifford said: "I think she's going to be remembered as a young girl who has, and who will, save an awful lot of lives."
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