She shot to fame in 1979 as a comedienne, actress, and sex symbol.
Later, she appeared in Superman III in Hollywood and reinvented herself as a U.S.-based psychologist, sex-and-relationships author, and broadcaster.
Today, she lives in a stronghold of Trump supporters in Florida, continuing her work and passions with the same energy and drive she has always shown.
A heroin addict forced himself upon her
Born under the crisp skies of Takapuna, Auckland in 1949, this actress arrived into a world brimming with curiosity.
By the age of four, her life had already become a journey across oceans, relocating to Australia alongside her brilliant scientist parents and two spirited sisters.
Everything seemed possible, until a harrowing moment changed her forever. According to her autobiography, she was raped at age 16 by a 35-year-old heroin addict and contracted a sexually transmitted infection (STI).
She kept the incident to herself, but once her parents discovered her infection, they kicked her out of the family home. As she recalled, ”I remember the feeling well, because I still experience it every time someone rejects me, even in some relatively small way.”
As mentioned, the comedienne’s parents were academics — her dad a zoologist, her mom a biologist. They were distant, cold, and sometimes outright harsh, even telling her she was like an experiment.
“Did they deliberately deprive me of love and comfort to see how I’d turn out? Sometimes it felt that way,” the actress wrote in her book.
Her father kicked her out of the house
According to her, her parents had huge expectations for their first child. She started reading at three and scored high on IQ tests. By age seven, she was bumped up a grade, where she faced bullying and became a social outcast.
Still, she pushed herself to excel because, as she puts it, “my father made it clear that second place was unacceptable.”
That lack of nurturing left a lasting impact. “I had this thing about touch. I really crave hugs and touch, but when I get into that position, I feel slightly anxious, like it makes me sad, because it reminds me of what I missed. It happens to a lot of people who haven’t been held as children.”
With that in mind, it doesn’t seem quite so unthinkable that her parents actually threw her out into the cold when they found out she had a sexually transmitted disease.
When she was gravely ill with glandular fever and gonorrhea, her father came to her bedside and said, “You were supposed to keep yourself clean until marriage. You are no longer my daughter.”
But despite being thrown out of the house, this woman managed to rise again.
Breaking the mold
In 1971, the aspiring actress took her exams at the National Institute for Dramatic Art in Sydney, and her career slowly began to take off. It wasn’t an overnight success. She was often poor and didn’t always get the best roles. In Australia, she also spent a lot of energy fighting against typecasting in theater, and her outbursts sometimes made it into the press.
Maybe because of that, she moved to the United Kingdom in 1976, where she appeared in a number of films and TV shows. But it was as a comedian that she would make her big breakthrough, later being described in the UK as “one of the cheekiest exports from the colonies.”
She gained fame on a British sketch-comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News in the late ’70s and early ’80s, performing alongside well-known comedians like Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
On the show, she broke the mold. She wasn’t just the lone woman in a comedy team dominated the posh guys, she played a sexy female character herself, at a time when women were usually portrayed by the men in drag.
”I kept thinking, I want to be a serious actress, which was stupid because I’m a terrible serious actress, I’m dreadful and I find straight acting so boring. I just didn’t listen to myself. I should have known that I was a comic,” she once explained.
Most memorable sketch
One of her most memorable sketches had her playing a car-rental receptionist who, when asked if a customer could use an American Express card, replied: ”That will do nicely, sir, and would you like to rub my tits, too?” — unbuttoning her blouse in the process. The sketch satirized the company’s advertising slogan, and a 2007 editorial said it “perfectly captured the ‘greed is good’ spirit of the 80s, the legacy of which is still being felt.”
Her work on the show led to a role in a major Hollywood film in the early ’80s. Playing Lorelei Ambrosia, the Kant-reading girlfriend of the film’s villain Ross Webster, she earned praise from many for her performance in Superman III.
But one critic felt the role didn’t showcase her talent, writing that she was “completely wasted in a part which would have been too dumb for Goldie Hawn.” Ouch.
In the mid-’80s, the now well-known actress and comic genius joined the American sketch show Saturday Night Live, becoming the show’s second, and only female, cast member born outside North America.
A new turn
For several years, she was described as one of the funniest woman in the world.
She played characters including Billy Idol and Cyndi Lauper. Looking back, Rolling Stone described her as “a bright spot in a weak season.”
Life took a new turn in 1989 when the actress married Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. The couple had actually been together for ten years before finally tying the knot on Fiji. Three years later, they moved to Los Angeles and raised three children together.
According to her autobiography, after years of reflection and having achieved her goals in comedy, she decided to pursue a career in psychology. In the early 1990s, after studying at Antioch University in the U.S., she became a qualified clinical psychologist.
She is also a successful author, having published several books. In 2002, she wrote a best-selling psycho-biography about her husband, titled Billy.
So who is this multi-talented woman we’re talking about? None other than Pamela Stephenson!
This New Zealand-born Australian-British psychologist, writer, actress, and comedian truly has many strings to her bow, and she now lives in Florida with her husband, Billy.
Her husband has had an extraordinary career. In addition to decades of live concerts that made him a beloved performer around the world, he has appeared in around 50 films and hundreds of TV shows. He survived prostate cancer but was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease roughly ten years ago.
”As my 80-year-old husband’s main caregiver, I try to reduce his stress,” she wrote to The Guardian in 2023.
“Our move to Florida was prompted by a need to situate Billy in a more relaxed place, without the extremes of temperature one experiences in New York. As is the case in Billy’s beloved Glasgow, for him a cold winter is accompanied by the likelihood of his slipping on ice and ‘falling on my arse’.
”So for now, our alternative environmental hazards are hurricanes, aggressive grackles and iguana poop,” she added.
From a childhood marked by challenge and resilience to a career that spanned comedy, acting, writing, and psychology, Pamela Stephenson has proven herself a true force of talent and determination.
Whether making audiences laugh on stage, analyzing the human mind, or sharing her insights through books, she has continually reinvented herself while leaving an indelible mark on every field she touches. What a ride it’s been — thanks for bringing us along, Pamela!
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