With The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson steps into a role she’s been ‘aching to play’ | Canada Voices

I know a handful of movies aren’t going to change 300,000 years of human attitudes about women, beauty and aging. I know many people feel #MeToo is over, and Hollywood is tiring of foregrounding underrepresented voices. But whoa, it’s been a relief to see films such as The Last Showgirl that acknowledge how women are commodified and then discarded. And it’s great that the women behind it, including director Gia Coppola (Palo Alto), have such intimate connections to their subject.

Pamela Anderson plays Shelly, a single mother who’s been performing in a Las Vegas revue, Le Razzle Dazzle, since 1987. She’s seen plenty of colleagues age of out of conventional sexual desirability, including her best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a dancer turned cocktail waitress. Now it’s Shelly’s turn: Her revue, the last of its kind, is closing, and she finds herself in her 50s, with no transferable skills and a strained relationship with her adult daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), whom she neglected to pursue a dream of beauty and power that never quite came true.

Shelly is the kind of character Anderson, 57, has been “aching to play,” she said in a recent video interview, and one for which her life uniquely prepared her. She spent decades cloaked in Invincible Babe armour, all breast implants, false eyelashes and hair extensions, running in a red tank suit on Baywatch and posing nude for Playboy. But while Shelly clings to her old life, Anderson is giddily shedding hers. In recent years, she’s wiped off her eyeliner, moved back to her childhood home on Vancouver Island and made a documentary (Pamela, A Love Story) and two series (Pamela’s Garden of Eden; Pamela’s Cooking with Love) that showcase the real her: ruminative diarist, animal activist, mother of two sons.

“I was playing characters my whole life in my personal life,” Anderson says. Her voice is girlishly high and she speaks quickly, but she’s far less nervous and self-deprecating than she was last year, when we spoke about her memoir Love, Pamela. “But I’d rather play characters in movies and be myself in real life – that’s what I discovered in my garden, surrounded by the trees who have known me since birth. Once I peeled back my layers of protection, I was open to other opportunities. I always wanted to be in this club” – independent film – “but I didn’t think I’d be accepted. But I couldn’t have played Shelly the way I did if I didn’t have the life I had.”

“Shelly and Pamela are both dreamers who are always optimistic, no matter what is hurled at them,” Coppola said in a separate video interview. “But Pamela is also an artist, bursting at the seams to express herself in new ways. She’s got this delicate strength, this fragile resilience, and she’s willing to be exposed.”

Anderson had bottled up a lot during her sex goddess days, and this film gives her opportunities to let it out, particularly the scene in which Shelly shreds her costume. “We were going to shoot that after lunch one day, but Pamela let me know, ‘I’m ready now, we’ve got to go,’” Coppola recalls. “We were a small production, so we were able to get the crew together quickly and capture the energy she was in. She did it in one take. We didn’t need to do it again, we had the raw, real thing.”

Every moment was vulnerable, Anderson says: “I put my entire life from my childhood until now into it. Being part of pop culture has been a blessing and a curse. I’ve lived a wild and colourful life, but I’m always trying to explain myself and show people that I’m more human than they imagine. Like Shelly, I feel some guilt and shame that comes with being a working single mother. And as a mother, sister, daughter, I put my whole family through a lot. They don’t say that to me, but I did. Now I’m in a better place.”

The Last Showgirl is set in workaday, behind-the-neon Vegas, so Coppola and screenwriter Kate Gersten let the seams show: the burnt, deserted look of the Strip in daylight. Shelly’s cheap furniture. The casual indignity of a gambler thrusting a tip into Annette’s cleavage, and the matter-of-fact way she ignores it.

Coppola shot at the Rio Hotel and Casino – on film, with available light, which adds a gritty, retro feel. The showgirls gallop down cramped stairwells to make their quick changes, and manoeuvre their dingy dressing room in towering headdresses. The crystal-and-feather-encrusted costumes, which weigh 25 kilograms, were designed by Bob Mackie for a show called Jubilee!; they’d been in storage for 30 years, until Dita Von Teese, the cabaret dancer who served as consultant to The Last Showgirl, helped Coppola access them.

As the granddaughter of Francis Ford and the niece of Sofia, Coppola grew up appreciating her grandfather’s ability to “make the impossible feel tangible,” and spent time on her aunt’s sets, admiring how “she’s able to be soft-spoken, true to who she is, and still accomplish just as much. She paved the way for women directors.” But Coppola also saw the way her late grandmother Eleanor’s career as a documentarian (Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse) was curtailed.

“It’s challenging to be a creative working mother; so much is set up against you systemically,” she says. Re-entering the work force after your children are older, “it’s hard for women to get jobs because you’re considered past a certain prime. It’s a story that is real and needs to be told.”

Lourd, who plays Shelly’s daughter, also grew up in showbiz: Her mother is Carrie Fisher, and her grandmother, Debbie Reynolds, did one-woman shows in Vegas. “Billie had the cathartic experience of playing her mother, with Shelly representing her grandma,” Coppola says. “That made everything more layered for me, the deep-rooted complications and love.”

As well, Curtis has been outspoken about aging and her body; a key scene in which Annette peels off her sexy-bellhop uniform to reveal strata of Spanx and stockings was her idea. “We need to see the lengths that women go through, how restricting it is,” she told Coppola. Annette is a bever-tainer – a cocktail waitress who also sings or dances, saving casinos money on union fees – and Curtis performs a mournful, lonely dance to the song Total Eclipse of the Heart, a show-stopping distillation of how women become invisible as they age.

“Vegas is out with the old, in with the new – demolish the Tropicana, bring in the Sphere,” Anderson says. “Women being discarded is part of that, and of our culture. I want to believe that I’m deserving of this new chance. It’s a new feeling for me. I’m working on it. I finally feel I’ve put my life somewhere – I put it all in this film. There’s not enough therapy in the world, or best friends you can talk to. Sometimes you need another outlet, and this was it.”

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