Yahoo Lifestyle Jamie Lee Curtis Wanted to Be in ‘The Last Showgirl’ So She Could Work With Pamela Anderson
Spoiler Alert: This story contains details about specific scenes in “The Last Showgirl.”
Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t hesitate when director Gia Coppola asked her to be in her drama, “The Last Showgirl.”
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“The truth is I wanted to be in this because it was called ‘The Last Showgirl’ and Pamela Anderson was going to play the last showgirl,” Curtis said during a post-screening Q&A of the Roadside Attractions film at CAA in Los Angeles on Saturday night.
The movie tells the story of Shelly, a 57-year-old Vegas showgirl who has been in the same Las Vegas show for decades. The movie unfolds as Shelly and the rest of the dancers are told that the new owners of the casino are closing the show. Curtis plays Annette, a former showgirl with a drinking and gambling problem struggling to survive as a casino cocktail waitress.
Asked how she prepared for the part, Curtis cracked, “I got a spray tan. I had never gotten a spray tan. I’ve never done it. I’ve checked the spray tan box — excuse the pun, [but] they put it everywhere.”
In one of the movie’s most heart-wrenching scenes, Annette is completely ignored as she dances in the middle of the casino to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” The sequence wasn’t in the script but Coppola told Curtis just before their first table read, “Annette is going to dance.” During their final day shooting at the Rio Hotel & Casino, Curtis recalled, “Gia walks up and says, ‘Annette’s dancing in five minutes.’”
Curtis did the dance in one take.
Curtis teared up talking about the real-life women working in Vegas. “There’s a Nancy Griffith song, ‘It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go,'” she said. “It’s a hard life for these women. This movie really moves me. It’s hard. It’s a hard place — Vegas. It’s all about reinvention. That’s really the nugget of it. It’s this constant reinvention. Annette is just the cautionary tale of what happens to women.”
Anderson said she related to Shelly in many ways. “I understood her and her love of nostalgia and the importance of glamour and performance and fantasy, making people happy and making herself happy.”
“The Last Showgirl” picked up two Golden Globes nominations on Monday morning, including best performance by a female actor in a motion picture-drama for Anderson and best original song for a motion picture for “Beautiful That Way” with music and lyrics by Andrew Wyatt, Miley Cyrus and Lykke Zachrisson.
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