Pamela Anderson Is in Her Prime

AS SHE CELEBRATES HER RED-HOT YEAR, THE STAR KEEPS THE SURPRISES COMING: ‘IT’S A WHOLE NEW WORLD, AND I’M EMBRACING IT’

- LIZ McNEIL,JEFF LIPSKY,ERIC ANDERSSON

Pamela Anderson has been a redhead since early autumn. Still, she says, “Sometimes I catch myself in the mirror and go, ‘Oh jeez. Who’s that?’ ” Even her mom told her, “This is going to take some getting used to.” Not to worry, says Anderson, who began going makeup-free two years ago and undertook this latest change for her next role, in Love Is Not the Answer, a comedy directed by Michael Cera. “I’ll be blonde in no time or maybe a different color. Who knows?”

She calls her transformation “another form of freedom”—the latest surprise in a year full of them, from her critically acclaimed performances in The Last Showgirl and the summer box office hit The Naked Gun to her romance with costar Liam Neeson. “I’m making the choices in my career and the way I look,” says the 58-year-old mom of adult sons Brandon, 29, and Dylan, 27, with rocker ex Tommy Lee. “I’m in control of my own life.” Soft-spoken, playful and charmingly quirky, she says, “Even sitting here I’m thinking, has this really happened, or did I dream all of this?”

Her nuanced performance in The Last Showgirl as a vulnerable Vegas dancer was a long-awaited dream come true and a lifetime away from Baywatch and the blonde-bombshell roles that made her world-famous in the ’90s. It might not have happened had the director Gia Coppola not tracked down her son Brandon and given him the script after Anderson’s agent turned it down without telling her. (He’s no longer her agent.) “I’d never been offered a good script,” she says. “To feel that feeling of ‘I’m the only one that could do this’—I had that.”