Slumped in front of an empty minibar in an anonymous hotel room, David Hasselhoff somehow managed to concentrate for long enough to phone home.

‘I’m drunk and I think I’m dying,’ the veteran star of Baywatch and Knight Rider slurred to his wife. Then the line went dead.

It was June 2002 and for Pamela Bach Hasselhoff the call came like a hammer blow. ‘It was only two days after I had dropped him off at the Betty Ford Centre in Palm Springs,’ she says with tears welling in her eyes. ‘After years of drinking, he’d finally admitted he had a problem and had agreed to go into rehab. It had all been such a huge relief. But then I got that phone call.

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‘I called the clinic and discovered he had checked out. I knew I had to go to him. I chartered a private plane and flew from LA to Palm Springs.’ Pamela learned that David had been taken to a local hospital, but didn’t know which one. ‘I got into a taxi and went to every hospital until I found him.’

She discovered later that he’d drunk the entire contents of the minibar and had been found by a maid, semi-conscious and half-naked on the floor. The police had been called. This sordid episode, like so many before, was covered up by Pamela and a team of minders. Hasselhoff was, after all, America’s most bankable TV star at the time.

‘Had news leaked out, it would have destroyed the image he created for himself and the image I created for my friends and family,’ says Pamela. ‘We were both living a lie but the biggest tragedy was that David loved the bottle more than me.’

To his fans – and he has thousands of them in Britain – David Hasselhoff is simply ‘The Hoff’, a  perma-tanned hunk of Hollywood beefcake.

He shot to fame in the Eighties as crime-fighter Michael Knight in the cult series Knight Rider, starring alongside a talking super-powered car called Kitt. But he is most famous, of course, for his starring role in Baywatch – the all-action series that followed the adventures of the muscled-up boys and gorgeous girls who made up a team of LA beach lifeguards.

With ratings boosted by swimsuit-clad co-stars such as Pamela Anderson, the series became, according to Guinness World Records, the most watched in TV history with 1.1billion viewers in 140 countries.

Even when the starring acting roles dried up ten years ago, Hasselhoff managed to reinvent himself thanks to his self-deprecating charm and an ability, rare among Hollywood stars, to appear not to take himself too seriously.