The Last Showgirl, starring Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a seasoned performer whose Las Vegas revue is closing, opens in the UK this Friday, February 28. In a recent interview for Entertainment Weekly, director Gia Coppola compared Pamela to Marilyn Monroe.
“‘It was all these actresses from the past I would dream about: Wouldn’t this be an interesting role for Marilyn Monroe?,’ the director tells EW, sitting backstage last weekend at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, before a post-screening Q&A of The Last Showgirl.
But then, it hit her, when she was watching Pamela Anderson’s 2023 Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story. ‘She is the Marilyn of our time,’ Coppola recalls. ‘I find her to be a very interesting human being. She’s very intelligent and has an art background, and I could see she was a woman that was really craving to express herself as an actress creatively. I saw a lot of parallels with Shelly, but I also saw this was a person that was really hungry to show her talents.'”
Interestingly, Marilyn played showgirls of sorts in many films, from Ladies of the Chorus and A Ticket to Tomahawk to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, River of No Return, There’s No Business Like Show Business, Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, Let’s Make Love, and of course, The Prince and the Showgirl.
But while her filmography is more celebrated than Anderson’s, Marilyn never got the chance to play a mature showgirl – with her character in The Misfits a possible exception, although Roslyn’s job as a nightclub dancer is left in the past.
Starting out as a Playboy model before landing parts in TV’s Baywatch and cult action flick Barb Wire, Pamela Anderson embodied a raunchier version of the blonde bombshell during the 1990s. Like Marilyn, she has often struggled to be taken seriously – but now, it seems her career is rising again.
Regular readers of this blog may remember her Bert Stern-inspired photo shoot from 2023 – and she also recreated Marilyn’s iconic ‘subway scene’ from The Seven Year Itch for a 2011 lingerie commercial. But in a new interview for NME, Pamela urges us not to take the comparisons too literally.
“When we speak, Anderson is dressed in off-whites, her blonde locks tied up and a pair of studious-looking black-rimmed glasses perched on her nose … Joining her on the call is her director Gia Coppola … ‘It just was an “aha” instinctual moment,’ Gia explains. ‘I mean, Pamela reminds me of a modern Marilyn where she was really an artist and craving to express herself, but pigeonholed by this other perception that doesn’t really reflect who she really feels she is.’ What does Anderson think about being compared to the iconic Marilyn Monroe? ‘She doesn’t like when I say that!’ chuckles Coppola, before Anderson can speak.
The actress blushes. ‘No, I don’t know… I do think that Marilyn didn’t get her dues, as an actress. I thought she was an incredible actress,’ she says, name-checking 1961 Monroe classic The Misfits. ‘You’re dealt whatever the cards you’ve been dealt, and you do the best you can with the tools that you have … and I think there’s no perfect way to be a human, a person, an artist, a mother … Beauty is perishable,’ Anderson sighs.”
And finally, Hollywood historian April VeVea has shared her thoughts on The Last Showgirl via Instagram…
The Marilyn Report 
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