Pam Grier

Pam Grier (born May 26, 1949, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S.) is an American actress who came to fame in the 1970s starring in blaxploitation movies such as Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), and Sheba, Baby (1975). A generation later, she had a career resurgence in Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown (1997).

Early life

Grier was born in North Carolina, grew up in Colorado, and spent a couple of years with her family in Swindon, England. Her mother was a nurse, and her father was a U.S. Air Force officer. She has recalled growing up with a “rural sensibility” and also dealing with racism as a girl.

After her parents divorced when she was 13, Grier’s mom raised her. While working as a receptionist at a radio station in Denver at age 18, Grier won a beauty contest. She attended Metropolitan State College of Denver but dropped out to attend film school at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

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Queen of blaxploitation

To pay her tuition at UCLA, Grier worked several jobs including being an extra in Russ Meyer’s cult film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and a backup singer for Bobby Womack. At one of these jobs, working the switchboard at a casting agency, an agent told her that B-movie producer Roger Corman was looking for actresses. Corman persuaded Grier to become an actress, and she starred in four women-in-prison films shot in the Philippines: The Big Doll House (1971), Women in Cages (1971), The Big Bird Cage (1972), and Black Mama White Mama (1973).

The box-office success of Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971) led to blaxploitation, a torrent of more than 200 genre films featuring Black actors and marketed to appeal to Black urban audiences. Grier’s first lead role in the genre was the title character in Coffy (1973), a nurse who methodically and violently works her way through the gang responsible for her sister’s drug addiction. Her charismatic performance as a tough action heroine made her an instant star.

Grier then starred as Foxy Brown (1974), who infiltrates the criminal organization that killed her boyfriend. The film ends with Foxy Brown’s memorable confrontation with the organization’s boss and her henchmen, in which she pulls a pistol out of her Afro. In Sheba, Baby (1975) she played a private detective helping her father against mobsters. That same year, she played the title character, a photographer who becomes embroiled in an assassination plot, in Friday Foster.

Jackie Brown and other roles

Blaxploitation had effectively ended in the mid-1970s, but Grier continued acting. She played a killer sex worker in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), in which she worked with Paul Newman, who inspired her to start acting in the theater. In Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), she acted as a witch, and she had recurring roles on the TV shows Miami Vice (1984–89) and Crime Story (1986–88). She costarred in Above the Law (1988), action star Steven Seagal’s film debut.

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In the 1990s she had roles in Van Peebles’s western Posse (1993) and Original Gangstas (1996), in which she teamed up with blaxploitation stalwarts Fred Williamson and Jim Brown in a tribute to the genre. She appeared in two science-fiction films in 1996: John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A., a sequel to Escape from New York (1981), and Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!, a comedy about an alien invasion.

Director Tarantino had been a longtime fan of Grier and cast her as the lead in Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch (1992). The film was Grier’s first lead role since the blaxploitation era. She played a flight attendant who smuggles money into the United States for a gun dealer. The criminal schemes in the plot are contrasted with Brown’s tentative romance with bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster, whose career was also revived by this film). Grier was acclaimed for her performance and received a Golden Globe Award nomination for best actress in a musical or comedy.

Grier followed her success in Jackie Brown with roles in Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001), the horror film Bones (2001), and the comedies Bad Grandmas (2017) and Poms (2019). She also continued acting in television, most notably in the Showtime series The L Word (2004–09), about a group of lesbians in Los Angeles.