“I’m proud of having achieved this much, but it’s not like I’m a tremendous actress or something,” Anderson told Macleans magazine. “It’s all a course of events, it’s all these things that have come together.”The daughter of a furnace repairman and a waitress, Pamela Anderson was first picked out of the crowd by a cameraman at a Vancouver football game. Her image was projected on to the screen, to roars of approval from the crowd, and the beer company whose T-shirt she was wearing signed her up as a model A photographer boyfriend sent photos to Playboy. Appearances on Home Improvement, and then Baywatch, followed.

Pamela’s charm was not just her 36C breasts – bumped up two sizes by plastic surgery – but that there was something easy and accessible about her.Tommy Lee was the much-tattooed front man of Motley Crue, the bad-boy heavy-metal rockers who from the mid-Eighties delivered a series of platinum albums They recorded their first when Lee was just 19. After a five-year split and legal battle for control, the band reunited in 1997 with its original lead singer, Vince Neil. But a new album, Generation Swine, and the tour that followed, were less than sensational. A band that had filled stadiums struggled to fill theatres and clubs; reports of several dates read like near riots. The tour was overshadowed by news of the video, and recurrent reports of drugs, alcohol abuse, and violence in the Lee marriage.Lee would perform his song “Brandon”, named for his and Pamela’s first child, on a white piano against home movies of the little boy, but audiences were warmed up with big-screen broadcasts of porno movies. During “Flush”, the screen would relay images of death: people falling off buildings, having limbs severed In “Helter Skelter”, it featured pictures of Charles Manson. Lee’s signature stunt was to ask women in the audience to bare their breasts for the cameras to pick out.

Usually, several did.In Phoenix, Arizona, last year, Lee and fellow band member Nikki Sixx were arrested, accused of assaulting a security guard who tried to keep fans from rushing the stage at the band’s urging. Anger and anarchy are part of Motley Crue’s stock in trade, but it went beyond play-acting: in 1994, Tommy Lee was accused of abuse when he lived with model Bobbi Brown.Anderson first filed for divorce in 1996, reportedly fed up with Lee’s drinking. She fled to the Aspen retreat of an old boyfriend, producer Jon Peters. Later, Lee wooed her back, it is said, by riding a white horse up to their Malibu home, but there were stories of violent outbursts on the Baywatch and Barb Wire sets – on the latter, he was reported to have smashed his fist through a trailer door. He also reportedly smashed a photo of her ex-boyfriend, singer Bret Michaels.The serious trouble began when Lee attacked a paparazzo cameraman late at night outside the Viper Room, the celebrated club on the Sunset Strip.

The attorney for the victim, Henry Trappler, was Gloria Allred, a celebrity LA lawyer who produced a tape of the incident shot by another cameraman. It proved, she said, that Lee grabbed her client and his camera without provocation and threw both to the ground, fracturing Trappler’s pelvis and ribs and sending him to hospital for four days. “It shows him throwing him with great force,” she said.Allred pleaded with the judge for incarceration. They offer a glorious mix of harmonising, rapping, samples and beats from every musical style, meshed into one uplifting soundscape.