Carmen Electra

A phone call from Prince in 1991 turned Tara Leigh Patrick from Sharonville, Ohio into Carmen Electra. He signed her to Paisley Park Records, put her on stage opening for him on the Diamonds and Pearls Tour across European arenas, and built the persona from scratch. The music didn't catch. Baywatch came in 1997, one season as a rookie lifeguard in a red swimsuit, and that was enough. The show reportedly pulled around a billion weekly viewers in over 140 countries. She didn't need a second season to lock in the image.

The red swimsuit era is thirty years ago, but she's still building on it. In February 2024, a court officially made Carmen Electra her legal name, completing a rebrand that Prince started in 1991. She launched Electraskin, a skincare brand, which tells you where her business instincts have landed. There's a Baywatch reboot in development at Fox, and she's made clear she wants back in. Whether the show gives a lifeguard from Season 8 a meaningful role or just a cameo is the real question.

The Dennis Rodman marriage in 1998 drew an annulment filing nine days in, then a reconciliation, before a divorce finalized about five months later in April 1999. She'd just lost her mother to brain cancer and her sister to a heart attack in the same period. Rodman's annulment filing cited 'unsound mind,' which they both seemed to accept as a reasonable description of the year. She attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati with a young Nick Lachey, and her first professional gig was dancing at a theme park. In 2002, a taxonomist named an extinct fly species Carmenelectra shechisme in her honor.