‘I stripped away this caricature that I created’: Pamela Anderson on makeup, activism and gardening

The star of Baywatch and The Last Showgirl answers questions from Observer readers and famous fans including Stella McCartney, Liam Neeson, Ruby Wax and Naomi Klein. Pamela Anderson, makeup-free and beautiful in a floral Westwood suit, is making a fuss of my dog. My dog likes her. I’m not a particular believer in the idea that animals are great character judges but, in this case, me and the dog are aligned. I like Anderson too. She combines openness with a kind of vulnerability, and you warm to her immediately.

Settled on a sofa in a small dressing room off a photography studio, she asks for a coffee and promptly spills it everywhere. “I strive for imperfection,” she jokes. “I strive for it, and I just hit it every time.” Cortado mopped, she takes a breath, before talking excitedly of a new phase in her eventful life. “A door opened, and I walked through,” she says. “It’s hard to believe.”.

Two years ago, Anderson had accepted that her time in the spotlight was pretty much done, and had decided to locate herself in and around her beachside home in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island in Canada. Her focus, she decided, would be her garden and animals. Though she’d long been a celebrity – smashing into 90s public consciousness as a Playboy model and scarlet-swimsuited Baywatch star, becoming notorious as one half of a sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll marriage to Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee, celebrated and disdained as a cartoon fantasy girl – she was no longer being offered any work she liked. She’d had a decade or so making money on international reality shows (India, Germany, Argentina, the UK); she’d made her mark as an animal rights activist; but that, she thought, was that. She gave up on her last marriage, to her bodyguard Dan Hayhurst, and went back home.

“I went home to my garden and made pickles and jams, I wrote a vegan cookbook, I did a vegan cooking show, and I was perfectly happy with that,” she says. “I spent some time for myself, stripping away this caricature that I created, because I’d started believing that it was true. You have to have self-acceptance, and I honestly believed it was over, that life. It was like a death, in a way. But it was the beginning.”.

The change began in 2022, when she played Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway, which she loved. “Doing it every night, the classic Fosse choreography,” she says. “I just realised you don’t know if you can do something unless you try. I’m not a dancer, I didn’t know I could sing. I didn’t know I could do any of it.” She brought out her autobiography in 2023, the same year as a Netflix documentary Pamela, A Love Story, which revealed Anderson as a sweet, gentle optimist and shifted people’s opinions of her (“I’m not a damsel in distress,” she says in it. “I put myself in crazy situations and I survived them”). But the real, life-changing breakthrough has come with the film The Last Showgirl.

Director Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis Ford, niece of Sophia) shot the whole movie in just 18 days, on dreamy 16mm film. It tells the story of the final days of the Razzle Dazzle, a long-running Vegas showgirl revue, all feathers and sparkly headdresses and mildly erotic dances, based on old Parisian Lido shows. Once the biggest pull on the Strip, times have changed, and the show is seen as dated and uncool, not funny or risque enough. It barely brings in an audience. The owners decide to close. Anderson plays Shelly, the longest-serving dancer, whose image is on the fading sign, who still believes in the glamour and the glitz, whose life is so wrapped around the Razzle Dazzle that she may well be lost without it.

Though she very nearly wasn’t in the film at all. Her ex-agent passed on the part without showing it to her, but Coppola approached Anderson’s son Brandon, and he got the script to his mother. “It was the first time I read a great script with a really well-rounded role that I felt like I could tackle, as an actress,” she says. “So that was exciting to me.” Anderson had enormous empathy for Shelly’s “flawed but very human” character, and related to her story, not least because Shelly has a daughter, Hannah (Anderson has two adult sons, Brandon and Dylan). “Raising a child in this industry is never easy,” she says, “and there’s no perfect way to be a parent.” And Hannah and Shelly’s relationship is far from perfect.

“No, it’s not, but Shelly thought she was doing what was best for her child,” says Anderson. “She also thought she was setting a good example, showing that you can follow your dreams, and we don’t have to play these roles that have been society’s roles for us. It’s always a fight, I think, for women. For some reason, we’re always explaining ourselves and our choices. I’m always explaining myself and my past.”.

There are meta-layers in the film, to do with casting and what we expect of women, especially desirable women as they age. Jamie Lee Curtis plays wise-cracking Annette, once a showgirl, now a hostess in a casino. (In one scene she dances on a low platform amid the slot machines, to Total Eclipse of the Heart; ignored by the punters, she has a strange lonely dignity.) Billie Lourd plays Hannah. Lourd, as daughter of Carrie Fisher, granddaughter of Debbie Reynolds, could bring in her experience of being the child in a family of performers.