Domino Harvey was a British beauty born to wealth and privilege.
The daughter of British actor Laurence Harvey and a frequent subject of British tabloid stories, she modeled on the runways of Europe before leaving the limelight to become a bounty hunter in South Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, carrying around her shotgun, Betsy.
In the shadow of Hollywood, Harvey's life made for perfect cinema. So much so that her exploits working for one of L.A.'s most famous bail bondsmen, Celes King III, inspired a big-budget movie to be released in August starring Keira Knightley.
But this week, just after director Tony Scott completed work on the picture, Harvey was found unconscious in the bathtub of her West Hollywood home. She later died. The Los Angeles County coroner's office had not determined a cause of death, though officials said they doubted foul play was involved.
Her death stunned Scott, Knightley and others who worked on the movie and made the 35-year-old once again fodder for the British tabloids.
The last few months of her life, however, were far from a happy Hollywood ending. She faced up to 10 years in federal prison on a federal grand jury indictment in Mississippi accusing her of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, distribution of methamphetamine and Oxycodone, and racketeering. She also pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance and was ordered into a treatment program.
A veteran of long periods in rehab, including two years at a top-dollar Hawaiian facility, Harvey was with "minders" from a 12-step program when she died, said British author Peter Evans, who described himself as her godfather.
"One of her favorite quotes was 'Heads you live and tails you die.' That to me encapsulates how she lived her life," Scott said. "There was nothing as intoxicating, not even drugs, as actually kicking down a door and wondering what was on the other side."
Harvey's mother was British Vogue model Paulene Stone, one of the faces of the '60s. Her father died when she was 4.
Her mother met and married Peter Morton, the Hard Rock Cafe impresario. The couple moved to United States while Harvey attended a series of exclusive British boarding schools.
"I think it was fear of the unknown and being alone that made me so aggressive," she once told the British paper Mail on Sunday.
She claimed in news reports to have been a model with the prestigious Ford agency, but no one there remembers her.
