Pamela Anderson is the Marilyn Monroe of our time,” the filmmaker Gia Coppola claimed last year, after casting Anderson in her first dramatic movie. Anderson’s role, in Coppola’s featherlight paean to old Hollywood glamour The Last Showgirl, has drawn the actor raves (and a recent Golden Globe nomination). She’s good in the film, as a fading burlesque dancer haunting the Las Vegas strip, giving a performance that, while warm and endearingly bruised, is also carried by its metatext: Shelly, in The Last Showgirl, is a beautiful symbol of an industry that’s moved on without her, a woman who’s never quite been taken as seriously as she should have been (or wanted to be).
It’s not hard to see the real-life parallels. Or why Coppola drew links between Monroe and Anderson. Like Monroe, Coppola added, Anderson was for years a woman “really craving to express herself as an actress creatively ... [who] was really hungry to show her talents”. But Monroe isn’t the best of analogues. If anything, it’s the late Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett whose career offers more overt parallels to where Anderson has come from – and where she might try to go next.
