David Hasselhoff

Before presiding over what seemed like an endless number of lifeguards running in slow motion, this curly-haired goof spent eight seasons playing tall, dark and handsome on The Young and the Restless. In the '80s, he made the move to prime time as a crime fighter with a verbose vehicle in Knight Rider. After the series ran out of gas, the sexy drama Baywatch brought his lifesaving skills to the beach. Hasselhoff concurrently embarked on a music career, releasing a number of albums to great (if incomprehensible) popularity in Europe, particularly in Germany and Austria. After several unnecessary specials and spin-off series, Baywatch bit the dust in 2000, and Hasselhoff kept busy in a number of middling projects, even making his critically snubbed Broadway debut in the musical Jekyll & Hide. Although his career seemed to be drowning stateside, "The Hoff" embraced his status as a pop-culture punch line, ended up playing a couple of campy roles in big movies (Click, Dodgeball) and returned to TV in 2006 as a judge on America's Got Talent. Off-camera life was not as lighthearted as he engaged in an ugly divorce from Pamela Bach, with allegations of abuse. Even after most of the details had been settled by the courts, the drama continued: In May 2007, a video featuring a drunken Hasselhoff was leaked to the media and resulted in the temporary suspension of his child visitation rights. The footage had been shot by his own daughter. In June 2007, he was awarded primary physical and sole legal custody of his children.