Career

After moving to California, she met singer Prince (a Minneapolis native), who persuaded her to change her name to Carmen Electra. Soon after, she signed a recording contract with Paisley Park Records, Prince’s company, marking the start of a short-lived rap career. In 1995, Electra started appearing in various television programs. Then, in May of 1996 she was featured in a nude pictorial in Playboy magazine, the first of several. This exposure led to higher profile television appearances, including Baywatch (cast member from 1997-1998) and MTV’s Singled Out. She returned to Baywatch for the 2003 reunion movie, Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding.

Electra has appeared in several films, such as Good Burger (1997), The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (1999), the horror spoof Scary Movie (2000) and also appeared in Scary Movie 4 (2006),Epic Movie(2007), and the remake of the 1970s TV show Starsky & Hutch (2004). She has also made cameo appearances as herself in the comedy American Dreamz. She regularly performed with the exotic dance troupe The Pussycat Dolls. Electra also created the highly successful Carmen Electra Aerobic Striptease series of DVDs which combines classic stripping moves with a low impact workout. Her most recent movie appearance is as Eugene Levy’s trophy wife in Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

Her acting work is regularly derided by critics; in the Roger Ebert review of the film Dirty Love,

“The Carmen Electra character, meanwhile, struts around like a “ho” in a bad music video, speaking black street talk as if she learned it phonetically, and pulling out a gun and holding it to a man’s head because she thinks, obviously, that pulling guns on guys is expected of any authentic black woman. A scene like that would be insulting in any other movie; here it possibly distracts her from doing something even more debasing”.

In 2005, she joined the voice cast of the animated series Tripping the Rift, replacing Gina Gershon as the voice of the sexy android “Six”. In late 2006, Carmen began to be featured in commercials by Taco Bell.

Electra is the current spokesmodel for Ritz Camera Centers, appearing in their television and print ads with CEO David Ritz. She is featured in some video spoofs of Lonelygirl15 that are advertising Epic Movie.

She is a playable character in the video game Def Jam: Fight for New York and is one of the celebrity challenges in the videogame, ESPN NFL 2K5, along with Steve-O, Jamie Kennedy, and others.