Jade Goody, the in-your-face star who went from being the posterchild for British boorishness to an exemplar of bravery following her cancer diagnosis, is feeling ill after "overdoing it" the day before she was due to wed tomorrow (NZT), public relations veteran Max Clifford said.
"Hopefully she'll be okay in the morning," Clifford said. "She's possibly done too much today."
Goody -- known to most Britons simply as "Jade" - is preparing for a celebrity wedding complete with the usual trimmings: a helicopter, a fancy hotel, a television crew, and a reported million pound deal to secure the rights to photos and video of the ceremony.
But in other ways it's far from being a typical celebrity marriage: The bride, 27, is bald from chemotherapy; the groom, 21-year-old Jack Tweed, is out on probation after assaulting a teenage boy with a golf club. She'll have a drip concealed under her designer dress for the painkillers; he'll be wearing an electronic monitoring tag.
Goody used to attract the media's ire like a magnet. The brash and buxom woman was plucked from obscurity to play in "Big Brother," a British reality television show. Her eye-popping gaffes -- she infamously complained of being "an escape goat" and questioned whether English was spoken in the US -- quickly made her such a target for ridicule that her own south London school had to defend itself by saying she wasn't a typical pupil.
Goody cashed in on her notoriety with an autobiography, fitness videos, and a line of perfume, but allegations of racism during a subsequent television appearance further clouded her reputation.
Goody's image began to turn around when she was diagnosed with cancer during the filming of a reality television episode in India last year.
Her decision to film her struggle with the disease, and make as much money from the process as possible for the benefit her two sons, has drawn praise from all corners of British society, including the once-hostile press.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Wednesday that Goody's story was tragic.
The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor said Goody was "a brave woman." "A lot of people might say 'well, it's better if she did everything in quiet."'
Murphy-O'Connor told Sky News television in comments due to be broadcast Sunday. "But I think she's made a decision that she wants the last months of her life to teach people something."
Photographs of Goody's bald head have been featured on the front pages of Britain's papers for much of the past week: The News of The World, Britain's best-selling Sunday tabloid, devoted its front page to Goody and Tweed sharing a kiss under the caption: "Wedding of the Year."
The marriage was due to take place at the Down Hall House Hotel in Hatfield Heath, in southeast England. Photos of the nuptials are to be printed in OK! magazine.
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