My battle with the menopause, by Pamela Anderson

Baywatch star Pamela Anderson opens up on hot flushes, turning 50 — and the much younger lover who’s helping her cope

Down in the South of France it feels like summer, even in February. warm sunshine dapples the ochre walls, the Mediterranean is a-sparkle and love, crazy love, is in the air. For here in Marseille, Pamela Anderson has found herself in the grip of un grand amour; she and a French footballer called Adil Rami are madly in love, oblivious to the language barrier and the 18-year age gap that might have kept less reckless lovers apart.

For a woman who is no stranger to unlikely romances — she married her first husband rocker Tommy Lee four days after they met — could this be her most surprising affair yet?

Consider the evidence. Pamela is the pneumatic 50-year-old former Baywatch star, who’s had three husbands, two sons and is now an actress-turned-activist whose pet causes include animal welfare, the environment and refugees. Adil is a 6ft 4in international defender, who is also the father of twin baby boys from a relationship with an equally pneumatic French lingerie model.

Yes, it’s complicated, but Pamela and Adil met last

Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often MAE WEST

summer and have been inseparable ever since. ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about him,’ she cries. ‘We want to protect our love. There are a lot of fake and phoney relationships out there, people just trying to get noticed.

‘He does not want this and neither do I. He is not with me because he wants attention and vice versa.’

Yet somehow she cannot stop herself. It’s just too intoxicating. ‘He cares about me deeply,’ she tells me. ‘We have a very healthy, simple wonderful life without all the bells and whistles. We both have our children to try to squeeze into the equation, but he is amazing. He is a good guy, really a good guy.’

The couple have lived together for the past six months in Marseille, where he plays for the local team. Life is good, despite the fact the sea views remind her daily of the plight of the refugees trying to reach Europe from Africa. ‘Every time I put even one foot in the Mediterranean, I think of them,’ she says.

She attends Adil’s home games, sitting high up in the grandstand where the bright plumage of her plunge cocktail dresses and tousled blonde hair make her look like an exotic bird nesting in an eyrie of navy padded jackets.

After eight months together, the couple have their routines. He trains relentlessly in the outdoor gym installed at their new home, while she likes to shop in the markets for Provencal vegetables to cook vast suppers for her hunky beau.

She never lets her glamour standards slip, though, even in the kitchen, and hasn’t worn flat shoes or jeans since leaving the U.S.

‘I don’t do sweatpants,’ she says, preferring a Pammy-tastic domestic uniform of ‘little vintage slips, sexy things.’ Sometimes Adil looks at her like he can’t believe it. ‘He calls me an alien,’ she says. An alien? ‘Yes. He says; “Come on, you must be 30 not 50. Show me your driver’s licence, this is impossible, impossible! There are plenty of girls younger than you, how do you do this?” But I say to him, how old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?’

It is the sort of thing one imagines Madame Macron once whispered across the pillow to Emmanuel, but can Pamela’s relationship survive long-term like theirs? On this point she is philosophical.

‘Well, I say to Adil; one day, I am going to fall apart, you know that? So be prepared. Let’s be in love for as long as we are in love and if there is ever one day, you look at me and go ugh, well, I can always go and live in another country.’

WHEn Pamela Anderson moved from California to the south of France last year, she wasn’t looking for romance. ‘I didn’t expect to fall in love, which is always when it happens, right?’ she laughs.

Then approaching her 50th birthday, she was driving fast towards a major crossroads in her life. She had been divorced from three husbands, while her two sons from her marriage to Tommy Lee were all grown up — Brandon (now 21) was travelling the world as an actor and model, musician Dylan (20) was forever in recording studios.

Pamela still had her activism, yet sometimes a certain lonesomeness began to creep across the threshold of her home in Malibu.

‘I would cook and make dinners and no one showed up. I was lonely and I felt, I am done here,’ she says. ‘I had empty nest syndrome, all sorts of syndromes. Hormones! Hot flushes! Moods! It was all happening.’

She had always feared the menopause because her mother ‘had a really hard time with hers’. Yet here it was bearing down upon her, before she was ready for it.

‘I knew something was changing. I definitely feel a change, I think I am peri-menopausal, or whatever it is called. I felt very emotional, very poetic, very dark and dreamy.’

After spending the previous four years and another £5million (‘all the money I had ever earned’) on rebuilding the Malibu property she bought for £1.3million in 2008, Pamela determined it was now or never.

She decided to rent out her home for a high season rate of £35,000 per month and go to St Tropez for the summer. Friends such as designer Dame Vivienne Westwood had told her she would love it there, and she did.

‘I didn’t know whether I was going to go home or not. I had this fantasy a lot of women have at this point in their life, which is to create a new life.’

It was Dame Vivienne who introduced her to Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who