Bearing a striking resemblance to her late mother, glamour model Anna Nicole Smith, 17-year-old Dannielynn Birkhead wowed in a red gown at this year’s Kentucky Derby.
WATCH: Watch Dannielynn and Larry Birkhead’s adorable father daughter dance.
The teen, who just graduated high school, attends the Derby and the Barnstable Brown Gala every year with her father Larry Birkhead, 51.
It’s poignant because it’s the same event where Larry met Dannielynn’s mother in 2003.
“I think the one year the babysitter cancelled. And then it became I brought her when she was able to kind of walk and do her own thing down the carpet, and then it became a tradition,” Larry told E! News.
“I brought her back here for a reason because it was something that was special. And it’s become a tradition for us out of me meeting her mum here,” he continued.
Keeping Anna Nicole’s memory alive is important to both Larry and Dannielynn. “We talk about her a lot at home, and share stories and funny things. And we have some things around the house that belong to her, like painting[s] with some very choice words written on the back,” the teen told E! News.
Larry also saved Anna’s clothes in storage for Dannielynn, who has recently started to wear them.
“There’s some T-shirts and different things she fits in but there’s also some things that she’ll say, ‘Dad, no thanks, that’s not my style.’ There’s also some things that would have to wait till later. Some things are a bit more revealing and low-cut,” Larry told People in 2023.
Anna was 39 when she died of an accidental drug overdose in February 2007 when Dannielynn was just 5 months old. It was also just five months after the sudden passing of her son, Daniel.
The 20-year-old had been visiting his mother and his newly arrived sister, when he died in Anna’s hospital room of an accidental drug overdose. Larry told the Wendy Williams Show in 2017 that he thought Anna had “truly died of a broken heart” after losing her son.
At the time of Dannielynn’s birth, Anna claimed the father was Howard K. Stern, the model’s lawyer and then-partner. But Larry demanded a paternity test and ultimately was proven to be the father after Anna’s death, gaining full custody of his daughter.
In a twist, Larry and Howard became close, as Larry revealed in an interview with ABC’S 20/20 in 2017, “The minute after the paternity test was over … he’s helping me change Dannielynn’s diaper, [showing me], ‘This is how you feed her’ … it’s been non-stop since then,” he said.
In the years that have followed, Dannielynn and Larry have lived a quiet life together in Kentucky. Dannielynn is now planning to study forensics and Japanese in college, she told E! News.
Meanwhile, Larry has told how he and Dannielynn commemorate special moments that remind them of Anna.
“I don’t make it too heavy on Dannielynn these days of rememberances,” he shared on Instagram in 2023. “Sometimes the dates should be happy, but they are sad – just like my birthday is the same day as Anna’s son, Daniel. So, you always are on a rollercoaster of emotions it seems.”
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