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: , 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 . 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 —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.
Pamela Anderson with her sons.