Why Pamela Anderson ‘Reminds’ Jamie Lee Curtis of Mother Janet Leigh: ‘Innocence’ and ‘Incredible Beauty’ (Exclusive)

For Jamie Lee Curtis, Pamela Anderson brings to mind another blonde beauty: Curtis’s mother, actress Janet Leigh.

In the new issue of PEOPLE, Curtis and Anderson — who costar in the new drama The Last Showgirl — discuss their new film and their friendship.

Though Curtis and Anderson had never met before filming director Sofia Coppola’s movie about two Las Vegas women at a crossroads in their lives, the former Halloween scream queen, 66, knew of the Baywatch icon, 57. 

“There was a picture of her in a bathing suit that I remember very clearly. How could you not?” Curtis says of Anderson. “Pamela is classically beautiful, my mother was classically beautiful. I have always thought I was cute at best, and felt as a child that way. And so in a way, Pamela reminds me of my mother.”

“There was an innocence about my mother and incredible beauty. I wrote a piece about her once [called] ‘Bye Bye, Beauty.’ And I think the opening line of that article was, ‘My mother was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life,’” continues Curtis about Leigh, the Psycho star who died at age 77 in 2004. 

“That is what I took from Pamela, was this incredible beauty and just openness, just really very moving to me,” continues Curtis.

Leigh was wed to Curtis’s father, Some Like It Hot actor Tony Curtis, from 1951 to 1962. The elder Curtis died in 2010 at age 85. 

Because of her parents’ fame, the Everything Everywhere All at Once actress has joked that she’s the original “Nepo Baby.”

“I have been a professional actress since I was 19 years old so that makes me an OG Nepo Baby,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories in 2022. “I’ve never understood, nor will I, what qualities got me hired that day, but since my first two lines on [the 1976-83 series Quincy M.E.] as a contract player at Universal Studios to this last spectacular creative year some 44 years later, there’s not a day in my professional life that goes by without my being reminded that I am the daughter of movie stars.”

“The current conversation about nepo babies is just designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt,” she continued. “For the record I have navigated 44 years with the advantages my associated and reflected fame brought me, I don’t pretend there aren’t any, that try to tell me that I have no value on my own.”

The Last Showgirl is in select theaters now before going wider on Jan. 10.

For more on Jamie Lee Curtis and Pamela Anderson, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE.