Anna Nicole Smith 'Never Got Over' Missing Out on Cameron Diaz's Role in 'The Mask' (Exclusive)

The woman born Vickie Lynn Hogan grew up wanting to be an actress.

"Vickie Lynn was good at mimicking," her uncle George Beall remembers, with whom the future Anna Nicole Smith lived for a time. "She liked to copy Carol Burnett a lot, of all things! Imitate her. She was good at it too! Back in her younger days, when she was 14, 15, acting and joking was a part of her."

Of course, as the tale of Anna Nicole Smith goes — and is laid out in the new Netflix documentary Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me — she quickly moved from Houston strip clubs to Playboy magazine to Guess jeans billboards and worldwide stardom.

"From the minute I met her, she always told me she was gonna end up being a famous model," recalls Missy Byrum, who met Smith while dancing at the same club and became her best friend and lover. (And the two would marry in an informal ceremony.) "And she always told me she was gonna die young." Like her idol Marilyn Monroe.

Smith told friends she was the reincarnated daughter of Marilyn Monroe. At her Playmate of the Year shoot in Malibu in 1993, Smith wandered around and looked through the window of the location home. She saw a painting of Monroe and knocked on the door.

"She begged me — please, please, please, can I see your painting?" The house belonged to Ashley Wells Lewis, a film producer. Lewis agreed and in walked Smith, collapsing before the painting. "Anna was just so big, she was huge," Lewis remembers, standing in front of the painting still on her wall in Malibu. "The hair, the boobs, the whole deal. Like this super woman. But Anna also had this elegance about her."

The two bonded over their love of Monroe. "Marilyn was an orphan and that's why people felt sorry for her," Smith would tell Lewis. "And that's why everybody loved her so much."

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Smith and her son Daniel began living with Lewis. She loved Lewis' rose garden there, with her favorite variety in the garden being "high society." "I could not believe this woman had been navigating Los Angeles on her own. Wells took her to get an agent. "I felt maternal with her."

Smith told Lewis she was being followed regularly, by people who worked for a man with whom Smith was involved. "It frightened her," she says. "She never told me who it was. She said, 'Ashley, people, they follow me everywhere I go. Dinner, my friends, they're right with me.'" She would get home and report to Wells: "I lost them. I took lots of cuts and corners."

Lewis was with Smith as she briefly navigated Hollywood and remembers her agent telling Smith to turn down $50,000 to star in 1994's The Mask opposite Jim Carrey, who Smith only knew as "that funny guy." "She never got over it," Lewis remembers. "I think it could've set her off the right path. It certainly didn't hurt Cameron Diaz."

In 2019, the director of The Mask Chuck Russell told Variety: "We met," he said. "Anna was charming and bubbly, but did not have other qualities needed for the role. I never took the next step to run scenes with her."

This account is disputed by Smith's friends — and in the Netflix documentary she is seen quoting how much she was offered for the role.

Instead, Lewis notes, she ended up choosing to do reality television, which exploited her need for love. "She was rewarded her for being high and drunk, doing crazy things that made her more interesting for them to film."

She was then lampooned on the same late-night talk shows which used to praise her as the most beautiful woman in the world. "She lived her life in pursuit of love," Lewis says. "She used to say, 'Ashley, if they say bad things about you, it's better than not saying anything, so I let them say bad things.' I think she would maybe not feel that way right now."

Looking back now, Smith's uncle says: "I think Hollywood put her in the fast lane, so to speak. The drugs and so forth. I think it ruined her more than anything. I think she made the most of it — but maybe she made a little too much of it."

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Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me streams on Netflix starting May 16.