When Prince died at Paisley Park on April 21, 2016, he left a vault full of unreleased music, a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no will. His sister and five half-siblings became his heirs under Minnesota law, and it took more than six years and a long fight with the tax authorities to settle the estate. He is the most famous recent example of a star who never wrote down what should happen when they died, and he is in crowded company.
1. Abraham Lincoln (1865)
Lincoln had worked as a lawyer for more than twenty years and had drawn up legal papers for clients, yet when he was shot at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865 he had no will. A judge, David Davis, was appointed to administer his estate, which was divided among his widow, Mary, and their two surviving sons. It is the example estate lawyers like to quote when a client says there is no hurry.
2. Jimi Hendrix (1970)
Hendrix died in London in September 1970 at 27 without a will. His father, Al Hendrix, inherited everything, and the rights to his music spent decades in disputes between relatives, lawyers and business managers. Al later passed control to his adopted daughter, Janie, which led to further court fights with Jimi’s brother, Leon, who was largely cut out.
3. Pablo Picasso (1973)
Picasso died in France at 91 with thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics in his houses, and no will. Six years of negotiation followed between his widow, his children and his grandchildren. Part of the French inheritance tax was paid in art, which is how the state acquired the works that became the Musée Picasso in Paris.
4. Bob Marley (1981)
Bob Marley was 36 when he died of cancer in Miami in May 1981. He had refused to write a will, a choice often linked to his Rastafarian faith. Under Jamaican law his widow, Rita, was entitled to a share and his children to the rest, and with eleven children recognised by the estate the result was years of litigation. Rita Marley was later found to have forged signatures on documents to keep control of part of the estate, and the administration was taken over by a bank.
5. Tupac Shakur (1996)
Tupac was shot in Las Vegas in September 1996 and died six days later at 25. He had no will, so his mother, Afeni Shakur, inherited his estate, including a large stock of unreleased recordings. She set up Amaru Entertainment and spent the rest of her life releasing posthumous albums, several of which sold millions of copies.
6. Amy Winehouse (2011)
Amy Winehouse died in London in July 2011 at 27 without a will. Under English law her estate went to her parents, Mitch and Janis. Her former husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who had divorced her in 2009, had no claim. Her parents set up the Amy Winehouse Foundation, which works on young people’s drug and alcohol problems.
7. Aretha Franklin (2018)
When Aretha Franklin died in August 2018, her family believed she had left no will. The next year, relatives found three handwritten documents in her house in Detroit, one of them in a notebook under the cushions of a sofa. Her sons disagreed over which one counted. In 2023 a Michigan jury decided that a 2014 document from the sofa was a valid will, more than five years after her death.
Estate lawyers keep coming back to Lincoln, the lawyer, and Prince, who controlled every detail of his music in life and left nothing on paper about what should happen to it afterwards. Both knew exactly what a will was for.