With her red swimsuit, Playboy covers, and leaked sex tape, Pamela Anderson became the ultimate sex symbol of the nineties. Nowadays, the 58-year-old actress appears on the red carpet without makeup and turns her back on her old image. Why does she want to break free from it?
Anderson was only 22 when she caught the attention of a cameraman at a Canadian football game in 1989. The blonde was in the audience wearing a T-shirt of the beer brand Labatt. The beer brand was impressed by the images and immediately hired her as a model. Then the ball started rolling: in that same year, she was on the cover of Playboy. Hollywood also noticed Anderson. She got roles in series such as Baywatch and Home Improvement. Because of her new work, the Canadian had her breasts enlarged twice and moved to California.
In 1995, Anderson had a successful career as a model and actress and met Tommy Lee, the drummer of rock band Mötley Crüe. They only knew each other for four days when they got married. In that same year, a frustrated handyman stole a video tape from the couple’s safe. The tape, on which Lee and Anderson have sex several times, spread quickly.
“It was such an invasion of our privacy,” Anderson later said in her Netflix documentary Pamela, A Love Story. According to her, the tape confirmed the image that many people had of her. “You become a character. I was the laughingstock on many talk shows, it was incredibly humiliating. I think that was the beginning of the decline of whatever image I had.”
Lee and Anderson were often in the news after that. For example, Lee received a six-month prison sentence because he had abused her. Anderson also said that she contracted hepatitis C because she had shared tattoo needles with him. The two separated in 1998. A four-year battle over the custody of their two sons followed.
In 2022, Pam & Tommy was released, a series about their turbulent relationship. Anderson was not involved in the drama series. She called the makers “jerks” to Variety. “It’s rubbing salt in the wound.” She believes that the makers should have asked her for permission. Yet Anderson does not blame lead actress Lily James. “I just think it’s difficult to play someone if you can’t see the whole picture. She’s a beautiful girl and she was just doing her job. But the series is really heartbreaking for me.”
Anderson then married four more times, including to singer Kid Rock and her bodyguard. The actress later said that she regrets most of her marriages. “But I also learned a lot from it,” she told Bustle. “I think with my heart, not with my head. But it’s already happened, I can only make better choices in the future.”
In the years after the leaked sex tape, Anderson played the blonde bombshell in various series and films. For example, she can be seen in Scary Movie 3 and she once again plays lifeguard C.J. Parker in Baywatch (2017). But then in 2023, she appeared almost unrecognizable on the red carpet during Fashion Week in Paris. She wears no makeup and her normally provocative clothing has been replaced by a more covering outfit.
“I started to let go of the image I always had of myself,” she told Better Homes & Gardens about her external transformation. “Who is this cartoon character that I created? I’m not that person anymore.” Anderson decided to leave Hollywood during the corona pandemic and move back to Canada. “I felt like I had ruined everything, that my life was a accumulation of mistakes. I went back home and started building the garden. That felt like a metaphor for building my life.”
The actress finds it annoying that the world continues to see her as a sex symbol, because she has experienced large parts of her career as traumatic. “I don’t think it’s sexy,” she says in the podcast How To Fail With Elizabeth Day. “It got me a lot of attention that I didn’t like. But I don’t like to say it, because I’m not complaining. I want to challenge myself now and present myself in different ways, because women are many things. We are not just a wild animal between the sheets.”
Now Anderson is also taking on other roles. For example, in 2024 she plays the lead role in The Last Showgirl, an arthouse film about an aging showgirl. The film is praised by critics and Anderson even receives a Golden Globe nomination. “I always knew that I had much more in me than I could show. That’s why I’m so grateful that I got this role,” Anderson told VRT. “I have the idea that I can now give my life a new meaning.”