Pamela Anderson will receive the Stella della Mole Award at Torino Film Festival, and the recognition arrives with a screening appearance that keeps her recent run in focus. Isabelle Huppert is in the headline here only because the award sits in a festival conversation that now centers on Anderson’s shift from screen nostalgia to current awards attention.
Anderson, 59, will be in Italy for the National Film Museum’s annual event from November 24 to December 2. She will introduce a special screening of 2024's The Last Showgirl and hold an on-stage conversation before the film, turning the honor into a live festival booking rather than a purely ceremonial presentation.
Giulio Base on The Last Showgirl
Giulio Base said, “Movies can sometimes work wonders, like making us [really] meet for the first time someone we’ve known all our lives.” He added, “With The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson gave us this experience.”
Base also said, “We thought we knew everything about her, but in this film every gesture of hers revealed a sensitivity as a performer that is both moving and surprising.” That framing matters because the festival is not rewarding a legacy image alone; it is tying the award to a specific performance that shifted how Anderson is being read as an actress.
Stella della Mole history
The Stella della Mole Award has previously gone to Spike Lee, Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas, which puts Anderson into a line of recipients associated with high-profile festival recognition. Her turn in Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl already brought her a 2025 Golden Globes nomination, so Torino is extending a momentum cycle that began with that film rather than starting one from scratch.
Anderson has been saying the same thing in a different register for months. She told The Graham Norton Show in early 2025, “There are lots of things in the works, so I am deciding what I want to do next,” and added, “I want challenging roles, I want to transform and see what I am made of. I feel like I have only just scratched the surface.”
From Baywatch to Torino
From 1992 until 1997, Anderson played Casey Jean 'C.J.' Parker in Baywatch, a role that made her one of television’s most recognizable faces. She later wrote for PEOPLE magazine that acting is “a survival mechanism” and “an industry of misfits,” and said, “Being an artist is solitary, lonely and full of secrets.”
That contradiction is why this Torino booking lands with weight: she has said she has been objectified, written off, made mistakes, reinvented herself time and again, and still found that “when I thought it was the end, it was truly the beginning.” The festival is betting on the same arc, and the screening plus on-stage conversation gives audiences a chance to see whether the new version of Anderson now outweighs the old one.
