The indomitable Pamela Anderson sees the best in everything

Pamela Anderson’s life story contains several showbiz-beauty clichés: an abusive childhood, accidental fame and many marriages. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth, she didn’t grow up with the Hollywood studio system, so there were no brilliant writers and directors laid on to make her acting career memorable. But the absence of this structure – in which women were deemed past it at 35 – also meant that she could do much as she pleased at an age when those earlier sex symbols were distraught, depressed or dead. Ten years ago she was branded ‘delinquent’ for running up $493,000 in unpaid taxes and moving to a trailer park in Malibu. Last year she bounced on to Broadway with a triumphant run in Chicago, and this year she has a smash hit Netflix documentary and a likely bestseller in this book.

Anderson was 22 when, at a sports event, her face was captured by one of those weird giant roving cameras.