The good knight

All eyes rest on David Hasselhoff. He sits with his back to the swimsuited masses, the chlorinated weight of their gaze upon him and his shirt, undone a button too far. "The hardest line I ever had to say was, 'I'm David Hasselhoff'." He smiles; white teeth, bronzed jaw.

Published: Sat 9 Sep 2006, 11:07 AM

Last updated: Sat 4 Apr 2015, 4:55 PM

"I was really having a panic. I said to the director, 'I don't know how to say this!' I'm David Hasselhoff. I'm David Hasselhoff. He goes, 'Say it like you're Superman: I'm DAVID HASSELHOFF'."

To be David Hasselhoff has become something akin to being Superman. He sits here today, 54 years old, 6ft 4in, looking precisely like David Hasselhoff, a chiselled figure of international renown. But while we are well versed in his superhero incarnation does anyone really know who David Hasselhoff is?

The facts are plentiful. From a childhood spent acting and a stint on the soaps, Hasselhoff found enormous global success as the star of Knight Rider and Baywatch, and as a pop star — he is famous, mainly, for being exceedingly popular in Germany. Today he is one of the most well recognised and best-loved stars in the world, an icon of kitsch, the star of humorous email montages, tribute websites and greetings cards; he has made cameo appearances in films such as Dodgeball and the Spongebob Squarepants movie, in which he was required to declare that troublesome 'I'm David Hasselhoff' line. He appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the most watched TV star in the world.

One wonders what tricks such fame might play on his mind. It must be something of a burden always to be The Hero, always The Hoff. And certainly there has been a dark underbelly to his radiant celebrity: two failed marriages — his most recent wife filed a domestic violence claim against him in court; a stint in rehab for alcoholism; a drink- driving charge. Earlier this northern summer, British tabloid newspapers reported that The Hoff had fallen off the wagon spectacularly, appearing drunk and disorderly at Wimbledon and in London-Heathrow airport, where it was rumoured he was in tears, too inebriated to board the plane — claims he vehemently denies. "I don't know if there really are mistakes in life," he says in a moment of reflection. "I think you have choices to make and the biggest choice that I made is I tried to save the world and forgot to save myself."

This afternoon, Hasselhoff is promoting his autobiography, Making Waves. He pats the book gently, leans in close to the cassette recorder and sonorously intones: "I wrote this book about inspiration, and about making waves. And you can make a lot of waves in your life, and you can inspire a lot of people." It is a book, he explains, that illustrates, "how I've tried to use Michael Knight and Baywatch and David Hasselhoff in a positive way — from the Great Ormond Street hospital with Princess Diana to hospitals in more than 40 countries. And that's what the book's about; it's about inspiration and it's about um ah ah" … His sentence sails about in the air before finally reaching dry land: "It's like that song! 'I've been a puppet, a poet, a pirate, a pauper, a pawn and a king, I've been up and down, over and out but there's only one thing, each time you find yourself flat on your face, you just pick yourself up and get back in the race!"' He beams triumphantly. "That's it, that's the book."

He says he has regained some self-respect by writing the book. "Because I realised all the amazing things that I've done," he says. And indeed it is a romp and a half in which Hasselhoff is always the swashbuckling hero, leaping from drinking gin and tonic with Liberace to almost being arrested in Austria, to hanging out with Zulu tribes and performing a song on the Berlin Wall in 1989. He writes of driving through Auckland, spotting a couple of children with Knight Rider backpacks, and winding down the window to ask: "Excuse me, have you seen Kitt?" (The name of the talking car in Knight Rider.) He tells of the little boy in Vienna with third-degree burns on 90 per cent of his body whose last wish was to attend a David Hasselhoff concert. 'Good God!' he declares. "We did some amazing things! Amazing things that nobody else would even think about doing, only because we could — we went to hospitals in 40 countries, we went to Soweto during apartheid. We took on the blacklist: I said put me at the top — I'm going into Soweto! We just thumbed our noses at everybody, in a positive way. We used my celebrity as a positive thing."

It was an acting profundity he carried to Knight Rider in 1982, telling the story of a modern-day crime-fighting knight who rode an artificially intelligent smart car named Kitt, and then in 1989 to Baywatch, a show based around the life and works of the Los Angeles County Lifeguards — he played chief lifeguard Mitch Buchanan — and on which he was also, in a move of financial canniness, executive producer. Across the world, both are among the most popular television shows of all time. In more recent times he has appeared in musical theatre on Broadway and in London's West End. Along the way he has weathered many personal disappointments, yet Hasselhoff has learned to ride these peaks and troughs with the Teflon-ed optimism of a self-help manual. A look of bone-dry sincerity sweeps across his face: "Amid all the adversity, whenever I had problems, God always said, 'Here's Chicago, here's a book, here's the No1 TV show, here's the No1 movie, here's a recording deal, here's two million downloads. I'm gonna make you the biggest star in the world, David, and I'm going to give you responsibility with that."

The media is not Hasselhoff's favourite subject today; the rash of stories in the British press over the summer has needled him. It has always been thus. Over the years, the press has panned his TV shows and reported his private life with wearisome predictability. When he decided to enter the Betty Ford clinic in 2002 to treat his alcoholism he faced a media onslaught. "Frankly, when I made a commitment to take care of myself when I was 50 years old I knew fully well that I was gog to get exploited by all the magazines, but I made that commitment because of my children," he explains. "I knew that it was time for me to get healthy. I was blown away by people writing negative things about a man who was trying to take care of a problem, which is a sickness, just like cancer - I was like, God, If I'd checked in for cancer would they have exploited me this bad?" But he says he was overwhelmed by the unwavering support of his fans, relaying back to him the message he had always broadcast to them: "Believe in yourself, keep a positive attitude, never, never give up, dreams do come true."

The constancy of his fans is a persistent theme in Making Waves. They are there swarming around his car in Puerto Rico, lying in hospital beds, writing him heartfelt letters, embracing him in Austria, and building shrines to him on the internet. Why does he suppose the TV reviewers never warmed to his shows the way his viewers did? Hasselhoff takes off his shades, his eyes sharp and blue. "Because they know who I am," he says with unshakable conviction. "Because I believe the camera photographs your aura, and it also photographs your heart. And I cast Baywatch that way. If you look at Baywatch, just about everybody on that show — even Pamela Anderson — has got a great heart. Here's the deal, I always said this: if you get a bad review, it's gonna be great. Because the people, the real people who watch Baywatch, aren't the people who do the reviews. They aren't the blue states, they're the red states. Bring it on! Eleven years we lasted! Top five show of all time!"

Knight Rider, he insists, remains more than just a TV show. "It's a phenomenon. It's bigger than Baywatch ever was." He has a bold and simple theory about the reason for its success: "It's because it was about saving lives, not taking lives, and it was how one man can make a difference. And we had a blast making it, and we made sure nobody died on the show. We made sure nobody ever drowned on Baywatch."

The Hoff was always a particular hit with women. All that charm, all that chest hair, all that twinkliness. Accordingly, his autobiography is thick with allusions to his amorous encounters, steaming up cars or canoodling on sets and in saunas. Does he worry that his daughters, now 16 and 14, will wince to read these passages? "No, no," he says, and buttons up his shirt, right to the collar. "That was when I was single. They know that when I was dad and I was a husband there were no fancy ladies around. I mean..." he says.

He softens, and flashes a winning smile. "I love women, I don't need to sleep with them to appreciate them. I learned that a long time ago." He recently announced that he would love to find an 'intelligent' English girlfriend. "That's what I want," he said, "a chick who is career-orientated." And he reminisces today about a trip he made to London: "I was pretty damned lonely because I didn't have my kids, my family, my wife — and I had this big suite. Everybody said they were gonna come visit me and nobody did. So I would go out every day and just play 1-2-3 with girls in the street. And it was fun. That's all I needed, yunno? I like making people smile."

He does indeed make people smile. But why is David Hasselhoff inherently funny? Does this really qualify him to be one of the most Googled names in the world? Hasselhoff himself appears to have heartily embraced his latest incarnation — even publicly sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the legend 'Don't Hassle the Hoff'. And though he undoubtedly has something of an ego, his reinvention perhaps owes as much to his hard-kilned work ethic. "I make lemons into lemonade," he confides. "That's what I'm good at."

Hasselhoff was certainly at the lemony nadir for a while. The joke ran that he was so naff the only place in the world that thought him cool was Germany. He was, he says, in Germany at the right time — his single, Looking For Freedom, released in 1989, capturing the spirit of the soon-to-be-reunified nation. "And people loved me over there," he says joyously. "But people love me everywhere! Everywhere I go, it's no different from Germany. And it's all because of Knight Rider. Except for Pakistan and India, where they're Baywatch nuts."

He remembers quite specifically the moment he felt the reincarnation from naff TV actor to global phenomenon begin. "I had a bunch of wankers hanging outside my dressing room at the Adelphi Theatre," he recalls, using the term affectionately. Four storeys up, applying his own greasepaint for Chicago, he heard them: …HOFF! HOFF! HOFF! HOFF!" they chanted. "I look down, and they're all dressed up as me, with wigs on and saying 'We love the Hoff!"' A few days later they returned with a cardboard Knight Rider car. Then four cars came to visit him, sitting beneath his dressing room window calling 'Michael, it's me, Kitt!' There were people in the theatre audience wearing masks of his face.

Not long after, Hasselhoff received a mail from his niece. "Are you aware," she asked, "of all this email stuff going back and forth about The Hoff?" And then the Sydney Morning Herald called. "They said how do you feel about being a pin-up at 52? And I said what? And they said you're in every secretary's office, and they have calendars floating around and they're all doing these Hoffisms. And I thought, something is going on here." A short while later he was in Australia, presenting an awards show. "Eighteen thousand people," he recalls with awe. "Five hundred people dressed as me, going 'Hoff! Hoff! Hoff!"'

Now he is preparing Hasselhoff - The Musical, another switch. You can't help but wonder how easy it has been to adapt to each new incarnation, from sci-fi Lone Ranger to swimming-trunked life-saver and now to super-kitsch king of the internet. "Acting is not a big deal, it's basically Halloween," he says. "But the roles that I've had have been so bizarre that they've been actually a little more difficult than if you had a regularly well-written script — like, if I was gonna be in, say, Reservoir Dogs, or the Godfather, or Dances with Wolves, or Lawrence of Arabia or ER. I..." His chin lifts and his gaze grows firm and noble, like Mitch Buchanan scanning the blue horizon for those lost out at sea. "I had to talk to a car".