Yasmine Bleeth has lived a life that is remarkably different from the one she led in the public eye since donning the now-iconic red swimsuit on the television program “Baywatch” about 20 years ago.
This week, a snapshot of the 51-year-old former beauty queen strolling her dog in Southern California showed that she had nearly completely changed.
In a commercial for Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears shampoo when she was just ten months old, Bleeth, who was born and raised in New York City, had her acting debut. She appeared in soap operas as a teenager, including “Ryan’s Hope,” but it was her part as Caroline Holden in “Baywatch,” which also starred Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff, that made her a household name.
Bleeth rushed across the dunes from 1993 to 1997 before transferring to the television sensation “Nash Bridges,” starring Don Johnson, on which she appeared from 1996 to 2001.
She has claimed that the cause of her escalating usage of recreational drugs was her troubled relationship with “21 Jump Street” actor Richard Grieco. In 2000, she checked herself into the Opulent Promises treatment center in Malibu to deal with her cocaine addiction. There, she first met the owner of a strip club and future husband Paul Cerrito.
The following year, allegations regarding Bleeth’s use of cocaine led to his arrest in Detroit.
Bleeth made a guilty plea for driving while intoxicated and for possession, and as a result, he was sentenced to two years of probation.
In an editorial that appeared in Glamour (via People) in April 2003, Bleeth opened out about her battle with heroin addiction. She confessed in the article that she had once passed out during a photo shoot and had not slept for five days.
Bleeth acknowledged that abstaining from drugs was now and would always be a significant part of his life.
