From Centennial-day baby to famous and sexy lady
Baywatch star Anderson supports worthy causes
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
She’s been called TV’s first sex goddess. Cultural critic Chuck Klosterman called her “the embodiment of modern female sexuality.” The Encyclopedia of British Columbia dryly notes that at the end of the 20th century, she could claim to be the most widely recognized Canadian in the world.
There’s little dispute that Anderson is a pop culture icon of enormous reach, magnitude — and ironic contradictions.
In the Wall Street Journal, she has denounced pornography as being for losers, but has appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine 15 times, more than any other woman. She played a comic book superhero in the 1996 movie Barb Wire, set, amusingly, in a dystopian future 2017 in which the United States was in thrall to Donald Trump-like villains. And she has appeared, bereft of cosmetic enhancements, in the avant-garde science fiction short Connected, a moral tale about physical decay, the cult of beauty, and a coming singularity in which humans merge with machines.
She had breast implants, then had them removed. She now advocates against breast augmentation. An explicit sex tape made with her then-husband Tommy Lee, drummer with the metal band Motley Crue, was stolen and sold online. But critics say public fascination with the controversial video and sympathy for the victim amped up her career. The tape is now thought to possibly be the most widely distributed film in history.
Anderson was born in Ladysmith on Canada Day, 1967, the eldest of Barry and Carol Anderson’s two children. She was an athlete at school — she ran the New York Marathon at age 46 — then worked as a waitress. At age 19, she moved to Vancouver.
She owes her roller-coaster ride to fame to the B.C. Lions. It was at a football game, wearing a Labatt’s T-shirt, that beer company advertising executives spotted her on the stadium’s scoreboard display and deftly signed her to an advertising contract as “The Blue Zone Girl.” She later appeared on the cover of Playboy, snagged a minor role in the television comedy Home Improvement, and took a major role in the action melodrama Baywatch, one of the most widely watched television shows with more than a billion viewers each week.
Thrice-married and the mother of two children, she campaigns actively for human rights, animal rights, against domestic violence, and for environmental causes.
“I am the ultimate California girl,” Anderson has said, “which is funny, being that I’m Canadian.”