Pamela Stephenson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Pamela Stephenson
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Stephenson in 1992
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Pamela Stephenson
4 December 1949 Takapuna, Auckland, New Zealand
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| Alma mater | California Graduate Institute (PhD, Clinical Psychology) |
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| Years active | 1971–present |
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| Children | 3 |
Pamela Stephenson, Lady Connolly (born 4 December 1949) is a New Zealand-born psychologist, writer, actress and comedian. She moved with her family to Australia in 1953 and studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). After playing several stage and television roles, Stephenson emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1976.
Stephenson appeared in British television shows, including Space: 1999, New Avengers, The Professionals and Tales of the Unexpected before her breakthrough role alongside Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones in the satirical sketch show Not the Nine O'Clock News (1979–1982). In 1981, for her part in that series, Stephenson was shortlisted for BAFTAs in the Actress and Light Entertainment performance categories. She appeared in the films History of the World, Part I (1981) and Superman III (1983), and from 1984 to 1985, she was cast in season 10 of the American comedy-sketch television show Saturday Night Live.
In the late 1980s, Stephenson co-founded the protest group Parents for Safe Food, which successfully campaigned for a UK ban on the possibly carcinogenic plant growth regulator Alar being sprayed on apples and pears for human consumption. Since a career-change to clinical psychology and obtaining a doctorate, Stephenson has written several books, including two about her husband Billy Connolly. She has presented a psychology themed interview show called Shrink Rap (2007), and has written Head Case: Treat Yourself to Better Mental Health (2009). She was a finalist in the eighth series of the BBC television show Strictly Come Dancing in 2010. Her autobiography The Varnished Untruth was published in 2012.
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Early life
Pamela Helen Stephenson was born on 4 December 1949 in Takapuna, Auckland. In 1953, she moved to Australia with her scientist parents and two sisters. She attended Boronia Park Primary School in Sydney and then Sydney Church of England Girls' Grammar School, Darlinghurst.
Performing career
Early career
Stephenson starred as Elsie in the ABC-TV production of the opera The Yeomen of the Guard (1972). From 1972 to 1973 she played Julie King, assistant to the title character in the Australian TV series Ryan, and in 1974 she was Josephine in the ABC production of Malcolm Williamson's opera The Violins of Saint-Jacques.
She moved to the UK in 1976, and made numerous television and film appearances, including as Michelle Osgood in the Space: 1999 episode "Catacombs of the Moon" (1976); Wendy in the 1977 New Avengers episode "Angels of Death"; and a supporting role in "Man from the South", the inaugural episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected in 1979. She played three different roles in British crime-action television drama series The Professionals in 1978.
Media scholar Leon Hunt suggested that one scene, where she played a nurse who has a live hand grenade retrieved from inside her blouse by one of the leads, epitomises the programme. She also played a nurse in Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers (1977).
Among her first appearances in the UK, she joined the live on-stage team at The Comic Strip led by Rik Mayall, Peter Richardson and Alexei Sayle at the Raymond Revuebar in Soho. This was not a happy experience, according to an interview she gave in 2014: "Doing stand-up was like a war with everyone playing this game of 'I can be funnier than you'."
Not the Nine O'Clock News
Stephenson gained prominence with her part in the UK sketch-comedy television show Not the Nine O'Clock News (1979–1982) alongside Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. It was a satirical sketch show, influenced by the surreal humour of Monty Python's Flying Circus. In The Guinness Book of Classic British TV, Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping wrote Stephenson "took up the punk ethic of outraging the audience with directness", and that "most critics were united in their praise of Atkinson and Stephenson". Stephenson caricatured newsreaders Angela Rippon and Jan Leeming in the show. In one sketch, she parodied musician Kate Bush with a song called "Oh England, My Leotard", which references Bush's song "Oh England My Lionheart" and is musically similar to "Them Heavy People". Bush's biographer Graeme Thomson said the spoof has "clever and very funny" elements.
Not the Nine O'Clock News was awarded the Golden Rose for innovation at the 1980 Montreux Festival. It won the BAFTA for Best Light Entertainment Programme in 1981, and Stephenson was shortlisted in the performance categories Actress and Light Entertainment performance. Spin-offs from the show included books, record albums, and the stage show Not in Front of the Audience. Stephenson made a comedy-sketch television pilot called Stephenson's Rocket, which was not taken up.
1980s and 1990s
Stephenson acted in the Mel Brooks comedy film History of the World, Part I (1981) but later recounted that she found it a dull experience due the lack of influence she had over the production. In 1982, she starred in the West End production of Joseph Papp's version of The Pirates of Penzance; The Times critic Irving Wardle wrote that Stephenson "reveals unsuspected coloratura powers as Mabel, but the part wastes her comic gift".
She appeared in Landscape's music video for their single "Norman Bates" (1981). The video was a pastiche of the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho (1960), with Stephenson taking the Janet Leigh role. Clive James's 2,000-line poem "Charles Charming's Challenges On The Pathway To The Throne", written in expectation of Prince Charles announcing his engagement, was performed for a two-week run in London starting in June, with the author accompanied by Stephenson and Russell Davies and was also released as a record album. The following year, Stephenson released her own double-single, containing four tracks written by Richard James Burgess, one of which featured Gary Kemp on guitar. It was poorly reviewed in several regional newspapers. She was the subject of an episode of Behind the Scenes with .., a 1981 BBC1 series about the creative process; David Williams of the Daily Post felt that the programme "tarnished her image a little". In 1982 she guested on BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs.
Director Richard Lester called Stephenson for a part in Superman III (1983) on the basis of her performances in Not The Nine O'Clock News. Her character was Lorelei Ambroisa, the Kant-reading girlfriend of the film's antagonist Ross Webster. In the opening sequence, Ambroisa is the foil for a series of sight gags that reference Lester's The Knack (1965); the character also has a love scene with Superman at the top of the Statue of Liberty. Joe Baltake of the Philadelphia Daily News rated her as "excellent" in the film, and Steve Jensen highlighted praised her performance in The Berkeley Gazette, but Colin Greenland of Imagine thought that she was "completely wasted in a part which would have been too dumb for Goldie Hawn". Stephenson starred alongside John Gielgud and Robert Hays in Scandalous (1984), directed by Rob Cohen. Critic Ben McCann dismissed the film as "notable only for wasting the talents of all concerned". Barry Forshaw's negative review of comedy horror Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984) in Starburst lamented "the shameful waste of talented performers like Pamela Stephenson". Finders Keepers (1984) received very mixed reviews, with Stephenson also receiving contrasting appraisals: Andrew Yule, in his biography of the director, Lester, praised "a deft appearance by the wonderfully funny, ridiculously underrated Pamela Stephenson", but Jon Casimir wrote in 1989 that "As sure an indicator of imminent mediocrity as any, Pamela Stephenson is cast as a supporting actress."
She was in the cast of American comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live (SNL) for season 10 in 1984–85, making her the first female SNL cast member born outside North America, the second overall at the time, joining Tony Rosato; and, as of 2019, the show's only New Zealander cast member. Her characters on the show included Billy Idol and Cyndi Lauper. In a retrospective article about the show in Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield described Stephenson as "a bright spot in a weak season". Back in the UK, she hosted an episode of the UK show Saturday Live in 1986. The 1986 drama Lost Empires saw her in a serious role, and The Daily Telegraph critic Charles Clover felt that Stephenson was one of the positives in a dull series. Prince Edward's charity television special The Grand Knockout Tournament (1987) included Stephenson amongst the many celebrities participating. She had a leading part in the critically-panned and commercially unsuccessful film Les Patterson Saves the World (1987). She toured in the one-woman theatre show Scandalous Behaviour (1987).
2010s and 2020s
In December 2010, Stephenson competed in the eighth series of the BBC1 television show Strictly Come Dancing, in which she was partnered by James Jordan. They reached the final and finished third, and Stephenson returned to the show for the 2016 Christmas Special. Stephenson was a guest on the BBC Radio 3 programme Private Passions in 2010, where her music choices included pieces by Vincenzo Bellini, Erik Satie and Claude Debussy. Stephenson formed a dance company with Brazilian lambazouk dancer Braz Dos Santos, and wrote and produced a dance-drama stage production called Brazouka. Harley Medcalf was lead producer and Arlene Phillips directed. The biographical show told the story of Dos Santos, who performed in the show, and his dancing. It premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2014 and toured South Africa and Australia until January 2015.
Psychology
According to her autobiography, after some years of consideration and having met all of her goals in comedy, Stephenson decided to switch to a career in psychology. In the early 1990s, after studying at Antioch University in the United States, Stephenson qualified as a clinical psychologist. In 1996, she obtained a doctorate in clinical psychology from the California Graduate Institute and set up a private practice. Her doctoral thesis topic was the "intra-psychic experience of fame". She became an adjunct professor at the California Graduate Institute. Stephenson's research included an investigation into the lives of transgender people in Samoa, Tonga and India.
Stephenson presented the television show Shrink Rap, in which she conducted psychology-based interviews with celebrities, including Salman Rushdie, Carrie Fisher and Robin Williams. The programme premiered on More4 in 2007. In 2009, Stephenson received an honorary degree from Robert Gordon University.
On the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, Sarah Silverman revealed that Pamela Stephenson was her therapist.
Politics and activism
At the 1987 United Kingdom general election, Stephenson was a candidate for the Blancmange Throwers Party in the parliamentary constituency of Windsor and Maidenhead; her campaign pledges included "free blancmanges for pensioners and the unemployed". She finished with 328 votes, the fewest of all of the candidates.
Stephenson co-founded the pressure group Parents for Safe Food group after becoming concerned about the spraying of the plant-growth-regulating chemical daminozide (also known as Alar), which is believed to be carcinogenic, on apples and pears for human consumption. In 1989, she led a group of celebrity mothers who went to 10 Downing Street to hand in a petition calling for a ban on the use of daminozide that was addressed to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Use of the chemical to spray fruit was banned in the UK later that year; news sources attributed the ban to Stephenson's group's campaign. In 2010, Stephenson travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with the international medical-aid charity Medical Emergency Relief International (Merlin) to meet survivors of violence against women.
Writing
In 2002, Stephenson published Billy, a biography of her husband, which Kirkus Reviews considered "balances wifely affection with professional analysis". It was a best-seller in Britain. Two years later, she released Bravemouth, a diary-style book focusing on Connolly in the year following his sixtieth birthday. Robbie Hudson of The Sunday Times wrote that it was "insubstantial" and "syrupy", while Kirkus Reviews felt that, like the earlier book, it contained "incisive revelations".
n 2004 and 2005, Stephenson took a year-long sailing voyage that followed a route Robert Louis Stevenson had taken; she wrote about the experience in Treasure Islands: Sailing the South Seas in the Wake of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson (2005). Kirkus Reviews described the book as "earnest and endearing", and said the illustrations "help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy". The following year, Connolly travelled on her family's boat to follow the South Pacific route her great-great-grandfather Samuel "Salty Sam" Stephenson took. The journey was documented in a four-part series shown on Sky Television and in her book Murder or Mutiny: Mystery, piracy and adventure in the Spice Islands (2006).
In 2007, Stephenson published Head Case: Treat Yourself to Better Mental Health.
Stephenson's autobiography The Varnished Untruth: My Story was published in 2012. Lee Randall of The Scotsman described it as "compelling and emotion-churning", and Jane Wheatley of The Sydney Morning Herald said there is plenty of "humour and vivid anecdote", and that "the real heft of this book and its leitmotif is Stephenson's childhood experience of being rejected by her parents; a legacy that dogs her life to this day".
During a lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s, Stephenson wrote Bum Farto – The Musical about the 1970s Florida fire chief Joseph "Bum" Farto.
Personal life
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In 1978, after filming an episode of Hazell with its star Nicholas Ball, Stephenson and Ball married. Stephenson converted to Buddhism in 1979, shortly before she joined the cast of Not the Nine O'Clock News. Stephenson left Ball to start a relationship with Billy Connolly, and she and Ball divorced in 1984. Connolly and Stephenson first met in 1979, when they filmed a sketch for Not the Nine O'Clock News and had lunch together. The following year, Stephenson and Connolly met again backstage at one of Connolly's shows. The pair lived together for ten years before they married in Fiji on 20 December 1989; Stephenson was "given away" by the comedian Barry Humphries. The couple have three daughters together.
Stephenson and Connolly moved to Los Angeles in 1991, and later alternated between homes in New York and Scotland. In 2002, on the BBC Radio 4 programme Devout Sceptics, Stephenson told Bel Mooney through Buddhism, "I could at last feel I had begun life as a wonderful piece of creation, that a person doesn't have to struggle every day to overcome darkness and sin".
Connolly was knighted in 2017, meaning Stephenson can formally style herself as Lady Connolly. As of September 2022, the couple lived in Key West, Florida.
See also
In Spanish: Pamela Stephenson para niños
