British Star Dies After Televised Cancer Battle

Jade Goody Lauded For Work to Raise Disease Awareness

LONDON, March 22 -- Jade Goody, the 27-year-old reality TV star whose battle with cervical cancer was chronicled by media cameras, which followed her even as she picked out her grave, died early Sunday.

"Jade died at 3:55 a.m. this morning," her mother, Jackiey Budden, told reporters outside her home in Essex, in southeast England. "Family and friends would like privacy at last."

Goody's life had come to symbolize a particular form of modern celebrity -- she was famous because she was famous, an ordinary working-class woman transformed into a national obsession by constant television coverage.

She learned in front of a television camera that she had cancer. And after doctors told her it was terminal, she set out to use her improbable celebrity to land media deals worth well over $1 million for her two boys, ages 5 and 4.

Goody married her boyfriend, Jack Tweed, on Feb. 22 and sold the magazine and television rights to the wedding. Tweed, 21, who had been recently released from prison for attacking a 16-year-old youth with a golf club, was allowed to spend the wedding night with Goody when authorities waived his curfew restrictions.

The justice secretary, Jack Straw, had personally authorized the move, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke of his concern for Goody's condition during his monthly news conference. Brown said Sunday that he was "deeply saddened" about her death.

"She was a courageous woman, both in life and death, and the whole country has admired her determination to provide a bright future for her children," Brown said. "She will be remembered fondly by all who knew her, and her family can be extremely proud of the work she has done to raise awareness of cervical cancer, which will benefit thousands of women across the U.K."

Goody allowed cameras to follow her constantly in the last weeks of her life, and national audiences were glued to prime-time documentaries detailing the smallest details of her treatment and physical deterioration.

"I've lived my whole adult life talking about my life. The only difference is that I'm talking about my death now. It's okay," Goody said in a recent newspaper interview.

"I've lived in front of the cameras. And maybe I'll die in front of them," she said. "And I know some people don't like what I'm doing, but at this point I really don't care what other people think. Now, it's about what I want."

The archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, praised Goody in a speech Sunday. "What she did in terms of her dying is very brave and very challenging, because it's about different kinds of making peace," he said. "We ought to honor that."

Medical organizations said Goody's public campaign dramatically raised awareness of cervical cancer, and doctors and hospitals have reported huge increases in the number of women coming in for screening.

"Her brave battle with an aggressive form of cervical cancer has received widespread public attention and encouraged thousands of women to seek advice on how to prevent the disease," said Harpal Kumar, head of Cancer Research UK. "She has done a great public service by raising awareness of the importance of screening during her last few months of life."

Goody, a former dental assistant and the daughter of two drug addicts, was plucked from obscurity in 2002 at age 21 to appear on the television hit "Big Brother." Goody seemed to have been chosen mainly for her appalling behavior.

She paraded around topless, swore constantly and treated the other contestants rudely. Her lack of education was jarring -- she thought Rio de Janeiro was a person and could not name the British prime minister.

But Goody gradually won over a public that began to see her not as crass and ignorant, but as unvarnished and straight-talking. Goody was not a perfect, surgery-enhanced star with two-story white teeth. People thought she looked like their neighbors -- or maybe even themselves.

On Sunday, British actor Stephen Fry praised Goody as "a kind of Princess [Diana] from the wrong side of the tracks."

Goody's talent was her lack of pretension, and that was enough to make her a one-name celebrity: Jade, a marketable brand. She produced exercise DVDs, opened a beauty salon, launched her own brand of perfume, wrote two autobiographies and continued to appear on television shows such as "Celebrity Wife Swap" and "Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes."

She was everywhere, all the time, for no apparent reason.

Public sentiment turned against Goody in 2007, when she was accused of racist bullying against Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty during an appearance on "Celebrity Big Brother."

More than 45,000 people complained to Britain's television standards regulator, and Goody visited India to apologize. It was there, on an Indian version of "Big Brother," that Goody learned, on live television, that she had cancer.

Max Clifford, the high-profile celebrity publicist who represented Goody, said Goody helped plan a funeral that he called a "Jade Goody Production."

"She wants it to be a big celebration because it's her final farewell to everybody," Clifford told reporters.