More than 30 years after her breakout role as C.J. Parker on Baywatch, Pamela Anderson has secured her first Golden Globe nomination for her comeback in The Last Showgirl.
A far cry from her typical bombshell roles, The Last Showgirl – directed by Gia Coppola, granddaughter of Francis Ford – sees the 57-year-old Vancouver native play Shelley, a veteran dancer who’s faced with a new reality as her Las Vegas show abruptly comes to a close after a 30-year run.
While Anderson has played plenty of roles on the big and small screen over the years, none of them had ever come close to generating any award season buzz.
“I thought it was over a long time ago,” she said at a screening for the new film. “I never thought I’d get to do a great film. But if you wait around long enough, dreams do come true.”
The nod for best performance by a female actor, which was announced Monday morning, is not only the first major nomination of her career, but the latest highlight in Anderson’s successful and ongoing reinvention – a process she has taken upon herself in recent years.
With the dual release of her memoir Love, Pamela and Netflix documentary Pamela, a Love Story in early 2023, as well as her cookbook I Love You: Recipes From the Heart this past October, she’s literally taken control of her own narrative. But the Pam-aissance, as some have termed it, has been in the making for quite some time now. Her 2022 return to the small screen in HGTV’s Pamela’s Garden of Eden provided audiences with an intimate look at Anderson away from the bright lights of Hollywood as she revisited her roots on the coast of Vancouver Island to restore her grandmother’s legacy property.
That same year also saw the release of Pam & Tommy, a mini-series that covered the events surrounding Anderson and ex-husband Tommy Lee’s stolen honeymoon sex tape. While Anderson didn’t have a say in how she was represented in the production, it painted her in a much more sympathetic light than the media did when the tape was leaked and distributed on the internet in the 1990s.
Recently Anderson has also turned heads by embracing a makeup-free look at a slew of glitzy events.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that Anderson was able to dig a little deeper emotionally for her performance in The Last Showgirl – especially with her own reinvention mirroring her character’s so closely.
Fellow Canadians who also received Golden Globes nominations include Hamilton-born Martin Short for best performance by a male actor in a television series – musical or comedy for his performance in Only Murders in the Building, Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve for Dune: Part Two, which is nominated in the best motion picture — drama category, and Vancouver’s Gabriel LaBelle for best performance by a male actor in a motion picture — musical or comedy for his turn as Canadian SNL founder Lorne Michaels in Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night.
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