Carmen Electra - Lavazza marquee during Crown Oaks Day in Melbourne 11-4-10

Carmen Electra (birth name Tara Leigh Patrick) was born on April 20, 1972 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is an American model, television personality, actress and singer.

Her family is of Irish, German, and Native American (Cherokee) descent. She attended Princeton High School for four years in Sharonville, a suburb of Cincinnati.

She is not related to adult film actress Tera Patrick, who's birth name is Linda Hopkins Shapiro.

She lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota and worked for Target Corporat
ion , before moving to Los Angeles in 1991. After moving to California she met the 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 singing career.

In 1995, before moving to Los Angeles in 1991, started appearing in various television programs. Then in May of 1996 she appeared in Playboy magazine. This led to an increasing role as a television personality on various shows, including regular roles on Baywatch and MTV's Singled Out.

She 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 the remake of the 1970s TV show Starsky & Hutch (2004).

She also regularly performed with the exotic dance troupe The Pussycat Dolls. She also created the highly successful Carmen Electra Aerobic Striptease series of DVDs which combines classic stripping moves with a low impact workout.

Carmen Electra's 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, he states: "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."