The casting announcement of Gia Coppola’s film “The Last Showgirl” caused an immediate pop culture frisson. The film—directed by Francis Ford Coppola’s granddaughter—focuses on Shelley, the aging star of Las Vegas’ last floor show, and the choices she faces when the production she’s starred in for decades closes down. The lead actor: Pamela Anderson, our own real-life longtime star with a shiny, almost too glamorous past, and a renaissance well underway, secured by reclaiming her own narrative with her startlingly vulnerable memoir, “Love, Pamela” and the documentary, “Pamela, A Love Story.”
The excitement was warranted: Anderson’s turn as Shelley in “The Last Showgirl” drew rapturous applause at this year’s TIFF. Sitting down with Anderson the week of the premiere, it’s impossible not to notice that while her face is bare and unadorned—befitting her rise as a no-makeup icon—she still shines with that rare quality: star power. She still displays a bit of that hand-twisting nervousness that has always undercut her glam image, but she is eager to talk, the words tumbling out of her.
When asked why Shelley’s journey resonated with her, she replied, simply, “Well, we’re the same.”
When she read the script, she felt like it had been written for her. “Every time I read it, the words and everything, I was just like, this is something really important for me to do, and I was so blessed to be able to get the chance to do it,” said Anderson.
She believes the story will resonate with a lot of women, particularly the mother-daughter relationship depicted. “A lot of my life has been backstage; trying to balance all the things we do as women, as parents—male or female, anybody—we’re all just trying to do the best we can, and realize our dreams at the same time,” she said. “What do you do in your fifties, and you’ve kind of put your career first and you haven’t been there for your kids enough? You’re facing your adult children—we all have to face our adult children and beg for forgiveness at some point in our lives about how we did the best we could with the tools we had.”
Anderson’s devotion to her now-adult sons, Dylan and Brandon, is evident in her next project: a deeply personal cookbook coming out October 15. It’s a collection of recipes Anderson has passed along to her sons as housewarming gifts, accompanied by personal stories. It’s called, simply, “I Love You.” Clearly, she has a lot of love these days: not least for her life on Vancouver Island.
Anderson says she felt like she had been keeping a secret her whole career: that she was capable of more than she’d done. Her seaside paradise, her carefully tended garden, was a place of solace and joy. “You sometimes go, ‘Well, it’s okay, people are going to think of me a certain way and I’ve just got to live with that,” she said. “[I can] go make some jam, go get some strawberries out of the garden, I can make some part of my life beautiful and creative.” She described seeing these plantings and projects come to fruition as profoundly satisfying, almost transcendent. “To see the result and go, ‘Oh, I did it, I did it,’ it’s like, ‘I can breathe. I can live. My whole life is changed.’”
One part of Anderson’s life that has not changed throughout the years is her commitment to fighting cruelty, most prominently as a face of PETA. She’s been offered many major campaigns, but has turned most down as they didn’t mesh with her iron-clad values. Signing on as an ambassador for the jewellery brand Pandora’s lab-grown diamond collection, however, was a fit. “I knew mining was bad for the environment, and with diamonds, there’s the cruelty that’s also associated with it,” she said.
Anderson always felt uncomfortable wearing extravagant fine jewellery on red carpets. “You just feel like, ‘My god, I cannot lose this, I can’t afford this,’” she says.
Her much-discussed recent affection for a pared-down look with little to no makeup has inspired a move toward wearing jewellery again. Back in the day, it didn’t make sense “with all that going on”—here, her hands swept expansively over her face and body to communicate her previous penchant for heavy makeup and glitzy outfits. Now, with her her “bare-faced and relaxed” style, “it’s kind of like your expression. I feel like it works.”
What’s next for Anderson? She hopes to become a grandmother soon. She is continuing to hone her sourdough skills; she brings her own starter when shooting on location and bakes bread for everybody on set. And she will always return to the garden. “I have a big, beautiful vegetable garden, and my heirloom tomatoes are coming,” she said with glee. They’re behind this year, she admitted. But they are emerging at last: a little late, perhaps, but damn near perfect.
