Pamela Anderson

She got famous because a stadium camera operator at a Canadian Football League game pointed a Jumbotron at her and the crowd went wild. That single moment landed her a Labatt's beer commercial, which led to Playboy, which led to Home Improvement, then Baywatch. She joined Baywatch in 1992 as C.J. Parker, and international distributors immediately wrote 'Pamela clauses' into their contracts, agreeing to buy only episodes she appeared in. The show hit 1.1 billion viewers weekly. She was the entire reason anyone outside North America was watching.

The industry spent decades reducing her to a punchline, and she spent 2023 and 2024 making everyone feel stupid about that. The Netflix documentary Pamela, A Love Story and her memoir Love, Pamela let her tell her own story for the first time. Then The Last Showgirl arrived, with Anderson playing a fading Vegas showgirl in Gia Coppola's film, and critics who'd dismissed her for years couldn't stop calling it one of the best performances of 2024. She earned her first Golden Globe nomination. In between, she started showing up to events without makeup, which became its own cultural conversation. She's done performing for an audience that never respected her anyway.

The sex tape was stolen. That's easy to forget because 1990s media treated it like a gossip item rather than a burglary. Rand Gauthier, a disgruntled electrician, stole a safe from their property and distributed the footage. She and Tommy Lee won a $1.48 million default judgment in 2022 against the distributor, nearly three decades after the fact. She didn't participate in Hulu's Pam & Tommy either. Away from the tabloid noise, she's been an animal rights and environmental activist through the Pamela Anderson Foundation, and her 2023 memoir Love, Pamela was written without a ghostwriter. She always had things to say. Nobody was paying attention to the right parts.