Larry Birkhead Shares Heartwarming Tribute to Anna Nicole Smith on Daughter’s 12th Birthday

Larry Birkhead celebrated daughter Dannielynn Birkhead’s 12th birthday by sharing an adorable photo of his daughter with her mother, the late Anna Nicole Smith.

“Wishing Dannielynn a Happy 12th Birthday! Her Mom would be so proud. The celebration is about to start,” Birkhead wrote on Friday.

He included a photo of Smith kissing Dannielynn as a toddler.

Smith died in 2007, a year after Dannielynn’s birth, from an overdose of prescription drugs. She was 39 years old. After her death, Birkhead went to court to prove he is Dannielynn’s father, with DNA tests eventually proving he was right.

In recent years, Birkhead and Dannielynn have become fixtures at the Kentucky Derby every year, with the father-daughter duo often wearing color-coordinated outfits. This year, they wore blue and white, and Dannielynn showed off braces with her smile.

In a September 2017 interview with Entertainment Tonight, Birkhead said his daughter has been pushing him to date.

“She is clinging to the female teachers,” Birkhead said at the time. “She’s clingy to her girlfriends’ moms and she’ll say things like, ‘Do you want to adopt me? Would you be my honorary mother?’ She tends to do that a lot.”

Birkhead also said she does not often ask questions about her mother, but has asked why her Wikipedia page lists her as being born “Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern.” Smith initially listed her attorney and partner Howard K. Stern as Dannielynn’s father on her birth certificate.

“I think [Anna and Dannielynn are] similar in a lot of ways. A lot of times, I make decisions and think about what Anna would think, or what she would think I did that for,” Birkhead told ET.

Birkhead also recently took Dannielynn back to the Bahamas, where she was born, to celebrate what would have been Smith’s 50th birthday. The photographer, 45, told Us Weekly he wanted to teach Dannielynn about the place where she was born.

“When Dannielynn was little and I used to bring her here, the people used to come out screaming, ‘The people’s princess Dannielynn is here,’ cause it was such a big deal about her birth here, and they embrace her and they come up and ask for pictures and stuff all the time,” Birkhead told the magazine.

He also said he wanted people to know about the good things Smith did, not just the infamous moments that made her well-known during her life.

“She was charitable and she did a lot of things for people that people don’t know,” Birkhead told Us Weekly. “I’m still getting these cards from kids that she supported overseas and they didn’t know she was Anna Nicole, but they’d come to have found out later.”

Photo credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Churchill Downs