Larry Birkhead spent years as an anonymous face behind other people’s cameras, a Louisville-born photographer working the fringes of Hollywood red carpets, until one relationship and one DNA test made him the story instead of the one telling it. In 2007, he was confirmed as the father of Dannielynn, the only child of Playboy Playmate and reality star Anna Nicole Smith, and he has spent nearly two decades since raising her largely out of the spotlight in the city where he grew up.
A Louisville Upbringing
Larry Birkhead was born January 22, 1973, in Jefferson County, Kentucky, and grew up in Louisville, graduating from Doss High School in 1991. He went on to the University of Louisville, earning a degree in journalism and communications in 1996. He started out as a freelance photographer in his hometown before relocating to Los Angeles to pursue celebrity and red-carpet photography full time.
His photographs of public figures at premieres and industry events appeared in magazines and on entertainment television, a working photographer’s living made largely anonymous by the nature of the job. That anonymity ended in Kentucky, at an event Birkhead had covered for years before it changed the course of his life.
Long before paternity tests and courtrooms made him a tabloid fixture, Birkhead’s work was the ordinary grind of freelance celebrity photography: staking out premieres, chasing usable frames of actors and musicians, and selling images to whichever outlet would pay for them. The Kentucky Derby, with its mix of Hollywood visitors and hometown pageantry, was a regular assignment rather than a personal milestone, at least until 2004.
Meeting Anna Nicole Smith
Birkhead met Anna Nicole Smith at the Barnstable Brown Gala in Louisville, the celebrity-studded charity party held annually the night before the Kentucky Derby to benefit diabetes research at the University of Kentucky. The two crossed paths again the next day at Churchill Downs, surrounded by television cameras filming Smith’s reality show.
“She grabs me and kisses me, in the middle of four reality show cameras.”
— Larry Birkhead, recalling meeting Anna Nicole Smith at Churchill Downs
Birkhead soon left Louisville for Los Angeles, where by his own account he and Smith dated on and off between August 2005 and February 2006. Smith, a former Playboy Playmate and star of her own reality series, was also engaged in a long-running legal battle over the estate of her late husband, oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall.
A Daughter, a Death, and a DNA Test
Smith gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn, in the Bahamas on September 7, 2006. The birth certificate listed Smith’s attorney and companion, Howard K. Stern, as the father, and paternity immediately became a subject of dispute among several men, including Birkhead. Five months later, on February 8, 2007, Smith died of an accidental drug overdose, leaving her daughter’s paternity and inheritance unresolved.
Birkhead filed suit to establish his paternity, and the case, Birkhead v. Marshall, played out in a Florida courtroom and in headlines worldwide. On April 10, 2007, DNA analyst Michael Baird announced that testing showed a 99.99 percent probability that Birkhead was Dannielynn’s biological father. Stern did not contest custody, and Birkhead legally renamed his daughter Dannielynn Hope Marshall Birkhead.
Birkhead was not the only man to claim paternity. Howard K. Stern, bodyguard Alexander Denk, and Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, all suggested at various points that they might be Dannielynn’s father, and the dispute over Smith’s body and burial location added another public, painful layer to the proceedings. The DNA result settled the paternity question definitively, even as other legal fights over Smith’s estate continued for years afterward.
“I fought so hard to be a father. And have my daughter.”
— Larry Birkhead
Bringing Dannielynn Home
Birkhead initially raised Dannielynn in Los Angeles, but in the fall of 2012 he moved her back to Louisville, settling in the suburb of Prospect to be closer to his ailing mother. The decision brought his daughter to the same city where he had grown up and where he had met her mother years earlier.
“I always envisioned if I had kids to bring them up in Louisville. And so to have Dannielynn here is kind of special.”
— Larry Birkhead, on returning home to Louisville, 2013
In Louisville, Birkhead worked to give his daughter as ordinary a childhood as her circumstances allowed. He picked her up from the public school she attended, kept no live-in nanny, and relied on family for support, all while a gold dress Smith once wore hung on display behind glass doors in the family’s home theater.
“I can’t believe all the twists and turns my life has taken, since I met Anna here in Kentucky.”
— Larry Birkhead
A Derby Day Tradition
Since Dannielynn was three years old, she and her father have returned each spring to the Barnstable Brown Gala and the Kentucky Derby, the same weekend that brought her parents together. Birkhead has described the tradition as a way of marking his daughter’s growth year to year, in photographs taken at the same track where his own story with her mother began.
“[Attending is] a way to pay tribute and to keep Anna’s memory and spirit alive in my heart. It makes me feel proud when I see her walk up the steps of the same place that I met her mom.”
— Larry Birkhead, on the annual Kentucky Derby tradition
By 2026, with Dannielynn finishing her freshman year of college, father and daughter suggested their nineteen-year Derby streak might be coming to a close, even as they kept up appearances at the Barnstable Brown Gala the night before the race.
“She’s almost 20 years old and there’s cooler people to hang out with me. … So this could be, like, the end of our photo book. We don’t know. But we had one hell of a scrapbook.”
— Larry Birkhead, on the 2026 Kentucky Derby
Legacy
Dannielynn, set to inherit tens of millions of dollars from her mother’s estate, has instead grown up largely offscreen, attending public school in the Louisville area and, by her own account, preferring a quiet life to the fame that surrounded her infancy. Some of the outfits she and her father wore to past Derbies are now on display at the Kentucky Derby Museum.
She has occasionally stepped in front of a camera on her own terms, including a Guess clothing campaign that echoed her mother’s modeling career, but has said she would rather focus on school, friends, and an eventual career than pursue public life. As she finished her freshman year of college in 2026, Dannielynn told Access Hollywood she wanted to step back from the spotlight entirely and enjoy time with people she loves.
Birkhead’s own career as a photographer has receded behind his role as a single father, but Louisville remains the fixed point of the story: the city where he was born and educated, where he first crossed paths with Anna Nicole Smith, and where he chose, above all other options available to him, to raise the daughter that meeting produced.
Sources and further reading
- Dannielynn Birkhead paternity case, Wikipedia
- “Larry Birkhead talks about life in Louisville with Dannielynn,” WAVE 3 News, November 20, 2013
- “Larry Birkhead Reveals the 2026 Kentucky Derby Was Likely His & Daughter Dannielynn’s Last,” EntertainmentNow, May 3, 2026
- “Larry Birkhead talks raising daughter Dannielynn out of the spotlight and their Kentucky Derby tradition,” Fox News