The star of Baywatch and The Last Showgirl answers questions from Observer readers and famous fans including Stella McCartney, Liam Neeson, Ruby Wax and Naomi KleinPamela Anderson, makeup-free and beautiful in a floral Westwood suit, is making a fuss of my dog,My dog likes her,I’m not a particular believer in the idea that animals are great character judges but, in this case, me and the dog are aligned,I like Anderson too,She combines openness with a kind of vulnerability, and you warm to her immediately.

Settled on a sofa in a small dressing room off a photography studio, she asks for a coffee and promptly spills it everywhere.“I strive for imperfection,” she jokes.“I strive for it, and I just hit it every time.” Cortado mopped, she takes a breath, before talking excitedly of a new phase in her eventful life.“A door opened, and I walked through,” she says.

“It’s hard to believe.”Two years ago, Anderson had accepted that her time in the spotlight was pretty much done, and had decided to locate herself in and around her beachside home in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island in Canada.Her focus, she decided, would be her garden and animals.Though she’d long been a celebrity – smashing into 90s public consciousness as a Playboy model and scarlet-swimsuited Baywatch star, becoming notorious as one half of a sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll marriage to Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee, celebrated and disdained as a cartoon fantasy girl – she was no longer being offered any work she liked.She’d had a decade or so making money on international reality shows (India, Germany, Argentina, the UK); she’d made her mark as an animal rights activist; but that, she thought, was that.

She gave up on her last marriage, to her bodyguard Dan Hayhurst, and went back home.“I went home to my garden and made pickles and jams, I wrote a vegan cookbook, I did a vegan cooking show, and I was perfectly happy with that,” she says.“I spent some time for myself, stripping away this caricature that I created, because I’d started believing that it was true.You have to have self-acceptance, and I honestly believed it was over, that life.It was like a death, in a way.

But it was the beginning.”The change began in 2022, when she played Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway, which she loved.“Doing it every night, the classic Fosse choreography,” she says.“I just realised you don’t know if you can do something unless you try.I’m not a dancer, I didn’t know I could sing.

I didn’t know I could do any of it.” She brought out her autobiography in 2023, the same year as a Netflix documentary Pamela, A Love Story, which revealed Anderson as a sweet, gentle optimist and shifted people’s opinions of her (“I’m not a damsel in distress,” she says in it.“I put myself in crazy situations and I survived them”).But the real, life-changing breakthrough has come with the film The Last Showgirl.Director Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis Ford, niece of Sophia) shot the whole movie in just 18 days, on dreamy 16mm film.

It tells the story of the final days of the Razzle Dazzle, a long-running Vegas showgirl revue, all feathers and sparkly headdresses and mildly erotic dances, based on old Parisian Lido shows.Once the biggest pull on the Strip, times have changed, and the show is seen as dated and uncool, not funny or risque enough.It barely brings in an audience.The owners decide to close.Anderson plays Shelly, the longest-serving dancer, whose image is on the fading sign, who still believes in the glamour and the glitz, whose life is so wrapped around the Razzle Dazzle that she may well be lost without it.

Though she very nearly wasn’t in the film at all,Her ex-agent passed on the part without showing it to her, but Coppola approached Anderson’s son Brandon, and he got the script to his mother,“It was the first time I read a great script with a really well-rounded role that I felt like I could tackle, as an actress,” she says,“So that was exciting to me,” Anderson had enormous empathy for Shelly’s “flawed but very human” character, and related to her story, not least because Shelly has a daughter, Hannah (Anderson has two adult sons, Brandon and Dylan).

“Raising a child in this industry is never easy,” she says, “and there’s no perfect way to be a parent.” And Hannah and Shelly’s relationship is far from perfect.“No, it’s not, but Shelly thought she was doing what was best for her child,” says Anderson.“She also thought she was setting a good example, showing that you can follow your dreams, and we don’t have to play these roles that have been society’s roles for us.It’s always a fight, I think, for women.

For some reason, we’re always explaining ourselves and our choices.I’m always explaining myself and my past.”There are meta-layers in the film, to do with casting and what we expect of women, especially desirable women as they age.Jamie Lee Curtis plays wise-cracking Annette, once a showgirl, now a hostess in a casino.(In one scene she dances on a low platform amid the slot machines, to Total Eclipse of the Heart; ignored by the punters, she has a strange lonely dignity.

) Billie Lourd plays Hannah,Lourd, as daughter of Carrie Fisher, granddaughter of Debbie Reynolds, could bring in her experience of being the child in a family of performers,“Billie said making the film was like therapy for her,” says Anderson,“You can talk to your best friend, you can go to therapy, but doing an art project heals parts of you that you don’t even know are hurt, all these places that we lock away in ourselves,If you can unlock those things.

And that’s what Shelly did for me,She’s unlocked parts of me that I locked away and I know I repressed in some way,”Anderson is good at revealing the complications and conflicts in Shelly,She’s a baby-voiced dreamer but also a tough worker, someone who genuinely believes in the beauty and worth of her vocation,“She believes in the fantasy of what she does, and I could relate to that.

When I moved from Canada to the States, I had my fantasy of what a model was, and I wanted to do the best I could.But then I’d see somebody else in a photoshoot and go, “Oh, my God, nobody else is rolling around like me”.Shelly has dreamed this life for herself and made it work.”And now Anderson’s dreams are starting to play out in real life.“I’ve been able to realise a little bit of my potential, and that changes the conversation.

Even in interviews, I feel like it’s apples and oranges.People, if they haven’t seen the film, ask me different questions than if they have seen it.”Her future projects include a remake of The Naked Gun, where she plays opposite Liam Neeson: “I’m a femme fatale.You can tell, because I wear a beret.” And she’s in Rosebush Pruning, directed by Karim Aïnouz, about a dysfunctional family: “I leave my family to the wolves, but it all gets turned around on me real quick.

” She loved working in a cast of “incredibly hot” actors – Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Elena Anaya, Tracy Letts – and also relished playing a few years older than her real age (she’s 57).It seems like Anderson has found herself; at least, her working self, her artistic and intellectual side, the one that wants to confront the discipline and emotional excavation of acting.“I’ve always read [Richard] Boleslavsky, Acting: The First Six Lessons, on repeat, over and over.I finish it, I start it again.I get something out of it each time,” she says.

“I wish there was an Actors Studio.I have a great acting teacher, Ivana Chubbuck, but I wish there was something comparable so I could work between projects.I have so much respect for the craft, and I’m just a sponge.I’m just aching to see what’s in me.”It’s like a flame has been lit inside you, I say.

“I feel like I’ve finally been able to access part of what I’m capable of,” she says.“If I never do anything else, I have done something.I feel like this has really been the catalyst for the rest of my life.”She reaches down and pets my dog again.Anderson has many fans.

How does she feel about answering some of their questions, I wonder?“Oh I’m excited,” she says.“This is my excited time.”The Last Showgirl opens in UK cinemas on FridayDesignerWhat is something in this world that you love and needs saving?Oh … cinema? I watched this documentary, Room 666 Room 999 [two docs filmed 40 years apart about the future of cinema] about the great directors that go to Cannes.They’re talking about saving cinema and how some people think it’s over.I feel like small films are the answer, because they’re a director’s singular vision.

Big studio pictures, there’s so many cooks in the kitchen that they lose their vision,I want to do a lot of independent cinema, work with directors who are artists,Of course, every actor wants to do this – but cinema is something I’d love to save,ActorHow does working in your garden inspire you in the same way a good script and director can?Everything seems to always go back to the garden for me, it is a good metaphor … There’s no easy way around it, there’s no shortcuts,You’ve got to nurture, and you’ve got to plant the seeds, and you’ve got to see it grow, and you see yourself grow, and you see what works, what doesn’t work.

It’s a lifetime obsession.Love and work and creativity, and also having some faith that you don’t have to control it.You don’t have to observe it.Writer and interviewerDo you miss your young Baywatch body?I still have my young Baywatch body! I was thinking that the other day.There’s little things here and there, but yes, still here.

90% maybe.DirectorPamela, you are a wise soul.I’ve never seen you fangirl more than when we were in Zurich visiting Carl Jung’s house.What is the greatest piece of advice you’ve been given?The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given is to be yourself.I think that came from me.

You know, you’re always trying to work out … what are my original thoughts? Who am I? How do I want to present myself to the world? I even tell my kids that,I say, “Tell me something that only you think,” Like: “Don’t think other people’s thoughts,” That’s important as an artist, but also as a person,Just to remind ourselves, because we’re inundated with so much information all the time, that we are not those thoughts, that we are not other people’s thoughts.

It’s always going back to who you are and what your purpose is, and what your reason for being here is,We all have a reason for being here,Writer and activistYou and I both live on the Salish Sea in British Columbia,It’s not exactly convenient,So I’m wondering, what does this ecosystem do for you?I live in a rainforest.

What a dream.The bald eagles, the whales, the owls… it’s so rich with life, and I feel like the trees have known me since birth.I like walking on the beach where I walked as a young girl, and it has always inspired me.I lived other places, but going home was really important to me, because I wanted to rewrite my beginnings, almost.When I did Broadway, the only picture I had on my mirror was of me at four years old