Pamela’s newfound freedom

Pamela Anderson longs to be taken seriously, said Jen Yamato on
TheDailyBeast.com. The former Baywatch babe, 48, is starring in
a new sci-fi movie, directed by art world filmmaker Luke Gilford,
that she considers her first real acting job ever. She’s also been
discussing possible film roles with the auteur Werner Herzog,
who told her: “I’ve always wanted to work with you.” An activist
on the environment and child abuse (she’s a survivor herself),
Anderson considers herself at “the beginning” of her second
career. Just a year ago, she was depressed and full of self-doubt,
stuck in a controlling fourth marriage to film producer Rick
Salomon. “If you’re in a bad relationship, that makes you feel
awful about yourself.’’ She was thinking of leaving Los Angeles
and wondering, “Am I going to disappear?” But then she finally
divorced Salomon, and fired her professional team. “I felt like I
was arguing with people all the time about where to go, what to
do, how to look. There is this formula that everybody wants
people to follow. [But] you can be a glamorous woman and
play another role. I just want to be the girl breaking the mould.
You’ve got to use everything you’ve got.”

The trouble with actors

At 75, Michael Gambon has
reluctantly abandoned the
theatre, because he can no
longer remember his lines. “I
miss it so much that it makes me
cry,” he told John Preston in
The Daily Telegraph. Some
veteran actors turn to directing
– but Gambon says he lacks the
necessary authority. “I tried it
once, at the National. It was a
disaster. I can’t even remember
what the play was, but I do
remember sitting in the rehearsal
room directing the actors. When
I said we should have a
ten-minute break, they all went
into a corner and started talking
about me. That was bad
enough, but then there was this
actress who was supposed to be
sitting beside her dead husband’s
side. All she kept doing was
fiddling with her handbag. I told
her: ‘You can’t do that; you’ve
got to look at your husband.’
She just said, ‘I’d rather
fiddle with my bag, thank
you.’ And that was it. I
never did it again.”

A mother’s guilt

Sue Klebold has spent the past
17 years trying to work out
where she went wrong, says
Emma Brockes in The
Guardian. In 1999 her son
Dylan and his friend Eric Harris
shot dead 13 people at
Columbine High School, before
killing themselves. Klebold
intinctively blamed herself. “A
mother is supposed to know,”
she says. Yet she’d had no idea
that her teenage son was
profoundly depressed, or that he
was hiding an illegal gun in the
house – let alone that he was
planning a massacre. She has
gone over and over Dylan’s
stable, middle-class childhood,
looking for clues as to how her
gentle “sunshine boy” turned
into a killer. “I remember being
certain that the birthday cake
I had given Dylan on his third
birthday wasn’t as pretty as
the one his brother had had on
his third birthday, which made
him feel unloved, and therefore
this happened. You go back over
every conversation, every gift,
every moment, and what you
feel is self-loathing. I let this
happen: it was my role to keep
him safe, and to keep others safe
too, and somehow this
happened because of me,
because I wasn’t able to stop it.”
She now believes that Dylan had
shown some signs of depression
– changing sleep patterns,
moodiness, getting into trouble
at school – but she failed to
recognise them. “I could see his
behaviours were changing. I
attributed it to being an
adolescent. That is why I now
say to people: if your children
misbehave, if a young man is
irritable, if your daughter has a
lot of somatic complaints, this
could be a mental issue.” And
don’t kid yourself that it
couldn’t happen in your family.
“One of the frightening things
about this reality is that people
who have family members who
do things like this are just like
the rest of us. I’ve met several
mums of mass shooters, and
they are as sweet and nice as
they can be. You wouldn’t know,
if you saw all of us in a room,
what brought us together.”