After spending most of her adult life in the glare of the media, British reality television star Jade Goody spent her last moments away from the cameras when she died in her sleep from cancer Sunday aged just 27. “Jade died at 3.55 A.M. this morning,” her tearful mother Jackiey Budden told reporters outside the house. “Family and friends would like privacy at last.” Goody shot to fame with her gaffes on the “Big Brother” reality television program in 2002, and earned international notoriety after taunting Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty on a celebrity edition of the show five years later. But it was the young mother's fight with cancer -- detailed by the media from the moment she learned she had the disease, to her wedding soon after being told it was terminal -- that won the nation's heart. The progress of her illness was captured on film and the tabloid newspapers splashed every new development, but while there were some questions about the ethics of such public pain, Goody won widespread support for her courage. Goody defended selling media rights to her dying days as the best way to provide for Bobby and Freddy, her two sons aged five and four with former boyfriend Jeff Brazier. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown led tributes to Goody Sunday, as he and cancer charities praised her for boosting young women's awareness of the disease. Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty on Sunday expressed her condolences to the family of Goody. “I am deeply saddened by the news but in hindsight glad she is out of pain and passed away peacefully in her sleep,” Shetty said in a statement in Mumbai.
