Get the latest gossip

‘I stripped away this caricature that I created’: Pamela Anderson on makeup, activism and gardening

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 Klein

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. 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. People don’t realise that when I was shooting Playboy covers, I was at Samuel French [bookshop], reading Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill and Sam Shepard, wondering, “How do I get from here to here?” Like, “Is that even a possibility?” I loved Barbara Loden and Ellen Burstyn and Elizabeth Hubert and Isabelle Huppert.

Get the Android app