Fame isn’t everything.
Pamela Anderson, 57, decided to move back to Canada because she wasn’t feeling good about her life, she revealed to Better Homes & Gardens.
“A few years back, I kind of gave up at some point and needed a change,” she said in the interview, published Wednesday. “I thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s just what people think of me.’ I was not in a good space when I moved back to Canada.”
The former “Baywatch” star added:“I don’t know what happened over the last few decades, but I feel now so far removed from the image of who I was. I felt very sad and lonely. I didn’t feel just misunderstood, I felt like I had really screwed up, that my whole life was a bundle of mistakes.”
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The former ’90s sex symbol said, “I was hard on myself, and I thought I put my family through a lot and put my kids through so much. I came to a point where I decided to move home and disappear and get into my garden.”
Anderson has two adult sons: Brandon Thomas Lee, 28, and Dylan Jagger Lee, 26, that she has with ex-husband Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, 61.
Anderson and Lee had a short yet infamously rocky marriage from 1995-98, culminating in a famous leaked sex tape (which was the material for the 2022 starring Sebastian Stan and Lily James).
After Lee, Anderson had four more husbands, including Kid Rock, poker player Rick Salomon — who she alleged put a crack pipe in her Christmas tree — Jon Peters and Dan Hayhurst (who she divorced most recently, in 2022).
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In her 2023 Netflix documentary “Pamela, A Love Story,” Anderson told her older son, “It’s probably gonna get me a lot of s–t for saying this, but I really loved your dad for all the right reasons. And I don’t think I’ve ever loved anybody else.”
She maintained in that film that Lee was the love of her life.
“I never got over not being able to make it work with the father of my kids,” Anderson said on-screen.
“And even though I thought I could re-create a family or fall in love with somebody else, it’s just not me. So I think that’s probably why I keep failing in all of my relationships.”
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The documentary also covered her parents’ tumultuous relationship during her isolated and harrowing childhood in Canada, which she said set an example for her.
“My parents were wild and crazy and madly in love, and made stupid decisions, and hurt each other and hurt us. But they stuck it out, and I can see that they’re happy now. So I think I’d rather be alone than not be with the father of my kids,” Anderson said. “It’s impossible to be with anybody else.”
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But, more recently, Anderson told Better Homes & Garden that she’s trying to “break the family cycles.”
“Sometimes I found myself caught up in things where I thought, ‘No, this is the way everybody else did it. I’m not doing it this way,'” she said.
“I see the family patterns, and then I get out of it somehow. I don’t want to keep running either. I want to stay. I still have a lot of growing up to do. In some ways I’m still a little kid trying to figure it all out.”
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The former Playboy model also told the outlet that the public perception of her persona isn’t quite accurate.
“People have this pneumatic kind of image of me from Playboy to ‘Baywatch,’ to my rock ’n’ roll type of husbands, to everything else.”
She added that she threw dinner parties and cooked meals for her kids, but that part of her life “wasn’t what was seen publicly.”
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But, she added, she also “played into” her public image.
“I’m glad I did all that, but I’m really glad I’m where I am now. I think the most important part is, I made it through all of it,” Anderson said.
“And now it’s such a relief that I get to be myself and enjoy this time.”
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During the pandemic lockdown, she was “finally able to sit” with herself, which led to a “healing experience.”
Anderson’s sons are now old enough to understand the “big picture” of her life.
“Of course, over the years, as they learned about things in my past, both age-appropriate and not age-appropriate, unfortunately, they thought I was taken advantage of in some ways,” she said.
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She told the outlet that her sons have said to her, “‘Whatever you’ve created by being you, just keep being you. We’re going to try and find ways for you to keep doing what you love but also sharing it with people in a way where it benefits you too.’”
Her advice to them, meanwhile, is to realize that “challenges are the poetry of your life.”
“You wouldn’t know hot if you didn’t know cold. You wouldn’t have appreciation for the good times without going through the hard times,” Anderson explained. “It’s all a roller coaster.”
