Charlize Theron was yesterday tipped to play Anna Nicole Smith in the inevitable Hollywood version of the Playboy Playmate’s tumultuous life, as a legal battle raged over her body.

The South African actress emerged as the favourite to be cast in the role of Smith, who died last week. Theron won an Oscar in 2004 for her portrayal of a serial killer in Monster.

The race to make a film of Smith’s life began yesterday as a judge gave the go-ahead for Smith’s surgically enhanced 42-26-38 body to be embalmed for a possible open-casket funeral, after her lawyer revealed that she had already ordered her funeral dress.

“We want to preserve the beauty and model figure of Miss Smith,” Florida Circuit Judge Larry Seidlin said. “Beauty was important to her.”

Ron Rale, Smith’s lawyer, said the former stripper had ordered a dress for her own funeral after her son, Daniel, died of an apparent drug overdose in September — just three days after she gave birth to her daughter, Dannielynn. “There’s a dress Anna Nicole had. The dressmaker had been preparing a dress,” Mr Rale said.

Lawyers returned to court to fight over Smith’s corpse as her will was made public, creating new legal turmoil.

The 2001 document left all her property to her lawyer and longtime companion, Howard Stern, to hold in trust for her son Daniel, now deceased.

The 16-page will appeared to exclude five-month old Dannielynn, the “billion-dollar baby” at the centre of a tug-of-war between at least three men claiming to be the father.

In the will Smith, who stood to inherit a fortune from her billionaire late husband, wrote: “I have intentionally omitted to provide for my spouse and other heirs, including future spouses and children and other descendants now living and those hereafter born or adopted.” Mr Stern is listed as the father on Dannielynn’s birth certificate. But Larry Birkhead, Smith’s ex-boyfriend, is seeking DNA from her body to support his paternity claim. Prince Frederic von Anhalt, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, who claims that he had a decade-long affair with Smith, is also seeking a DNA test to determine if he fathered the baby.

Smith’s estranged sister has suggested that Dannielynn might have been conceived with frozen sperm from the centrefold’s exhusband, J. Howard Marshall, the Texas oilman.

Following Smith’s collapse at a Florida hotel on February 8, the authorities have begun investigating possible misconduct by her personal doctor, who allegedly prescribed her methadone under an alias.

Dr Sandeep Kapoor allegedly prescribed Smith the painkilling drug, on August 25, 2006, 13 days before she gave birth.

New allegations about Smith’s behaviour in the final months of her life became public yesterday in a lawsuit by a former nanny who was fired in November. Quethlie Alexis claimed that Smith, 39, tried to kill herself twice after the death of her 20-year-old son.

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