Pamela Anderson makes hardly any money from Baywatch

Over thirty years after the show debuted, it's still hard to not link Pamela Anderson to her iconic red bikini on Baywatch.

The show, which focused on improbably attractive lifeguards, was a smash hit and catapulted Anderson into stardom.

Before she joined the show, the blonde bombshell was primarily known for her modelling work where she appeared in Playboy.

But despite the juggernaut success of Baywatch, the 56-year-old makes surprisingly little in residuals.

And I'm not talking a little in how some celebs might be miffed with only getting $50,000.

I mean, little - even by the standards of us non-Hollywood people.

Anderson opened up about the paltry payment while appearing on The Howard Stern Show.

Fremantle

She said: "You make like, a thousand dollars a year from Baywatch residuals."

When Stern questioned how this could be, Anderson pointed to streaming services like Amazon Prime as a factor.

When Anderson first joined the show in 1992, she was only being paid $1,500 per episode.

By the end of her five season run in 1997, she was taking home approximately $300,000 each episode.

This made her one of the highest paid actresses on television at the time.

The small sum of residuals isn't the only time that Anderson has lost out on a money making opportunity.

ABC

She didn't see one penny when her sex tape with then husband Tommy Lee was leaked.

In fairness, the former Playmate was offered the chance to cash in but refused as the tape had been stolen.

Her own son, Brandon Thomas Lee, even lamented the fact that she didn't earn any coin from it.

He said: "I wish she would have made the money.

"She would have made millions of dollars if she had just signed the paper. Instead she sat back with nothing and watched her career fizzle into thin air. She was in debt most of her life."

Brother Dylan added: "Things would have been different if she had made money on that tape.

"But people made millions of dollars and she was like 'no' because she 100 percent cared about her family being OK and me being OK."

Beyond her work with Playboy and on Baywatch, Anderson has been involved in animal welfare activism and reality television.

Earlier this year, she appeared in a Netflix documentary about her life called Pamela, A Love Story.

Many big revelations came out in that film, involving other famous figures that Anderson came across.

Topics: Pamela Anderson, Celebrity, TV and Film

Ben Thompson