Pamela Suzette Grier (born May 26, 1949) is an American actress, singer, and martial artist. She achieved fame for her starring roles in a string of 1970s action, blaxploitation and women-in-prison films for American International Pictures and New World Pictures. Her accolades include nominations for an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Satellite Award and a Saturn Award.
Grier came to prominence with her titular roles in the films Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974); her other major films during this period included The Big Doll House (1971), Women in Cages (1971), The Big Bird Cage (1972), Black Mama White Mama (1973), Scream Blacula Scream (1973), The Arena (1974), Sheba, Baby (1975), Bucktown (1975) and Friday Foster (1975). She also played alongside Richard Pryor as his character Wendell Scott’s wife in the film Greased Lightning (1977). She portrayed the title character in Tarantino's crime film Jackie Brown (1997), nearly three decades after her first starring role. Grier also appeared in Escape from L.A. (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996), Jawbreaker (1999), Holy Smoke! (1999), Snow Day (2000), Bones (2001), Just Wright (2010), Larry Crowne (2011) and Poms (2019).
On television, Grier portrayed Eleanor Winthrop in the Showtime comedy-drama series Linc's (1998–2000), Kate "Kit" Porter on the Showtime drama series The L Word (2004–2009), and Constance Terry in the ABC sitcom Bless This Mess (2019–2020). She received praise for her work in the animated series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child (1999).
In 2016, IndieWire named Grier one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
Early life
Grier was born on May 26, 1949, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the daughter of Gwendolyn Sylvia Davis, a homemaker and nurse, and Clarence Ransom Grier Jr., who worked as a mechanic and technical sergeant in the United States Air Force. She has one sister and one brother. Grier said she is of Black, Hispanic, Chinese, Filipino, and Cheyenne heritage. She was raised Catholic and later baptized as a Methodist.
Because of her father's military career, the family moved frequently during Grier's childhood. In 1956, they moved to Swindon, England, where her father worked on an air force base. By Grier's account, hers was one of the only Black families in town, though she recalled that they faced no racism or segregation compared to that in the United States: "They didn't care that I was Black since they hadn't been raised to hate Blacks. Instead, they'd been raised to hate Germans... In the U.S., especially in the South, we were never able to get buses to stop for us, we couldn't eat in certain restaurants, couldn't use certain bathrooms. Up until 1969, there were department stores in which my father and I weren't even allowed to try on clothing."
The family returned to the United States in 1958, when Grier's father was transferred to California's Travis Air Force Base, eventually settling in Denver, near Lowry Air Force Base. Grier spent part of her upbringing on her maternal grandparents' sugar beet farm in rural Wyoming, where their ancestors had homesteaded after fleeing west via the Underground Railroad to escape slavery. Grier attended East High School in Denver, and appeared in a number of stage productions, as well as participating in beauty contests to raise money for college tuition at Metropolitan State College.
Career
Grier moved to Los Angeles, in 1967, where she was initially hired to work the switchboard at American International Pictures (AIP). She is believed to have been discovered by the director Jack Hill, and was cast in Roger Corman women-in-prison films such as The Big Doll House (1971), Women in Cages (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972). While under contract at AIP, she became a staple of early 1970s blaxploitation films, playing bold, assertive women, beginning with Hill's Coffy (1973), in which she plays a nurse who seeks revenge on drug dealers. Her character was advertised in the trailer as the "baddest one-chick hit-squad that ever hit town!".
The film, which was filled with sexual and violent elements typical of the genre, was a box-office hit. Grier is considered the first African-American woman to headline an action film, as protagonists of previous blaxploitation films were men. In his review of Coffy, critic Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times praised the film for its believable female lead. He noted Grier was an actress of "beautiful face and astonishing form" and she possessed a kind of "physical life" missing from many other attractive actresses. Ebert thought highly of Grier in general during this era, saying in his review for Sheba, Baby how she brought "a sense of boundless energy" to her roles even in mediocre productions, was well-suited to action films and also showed some comic talent, and "seems to be having fun, and the characters she plays seem more athletic, more active, than a lot of the action roles played by aging male superstars."
Grier played similar characters in the AIP films Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba, Baby and Friday Foster (both 1975). With the demise of blaxploitation later in the 1970s, Grier appeared in smaller roles for many years. She acquired progressively larger character roles in the 1980s, including a drug addicted prostitute in Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), and a menacing witch in Something Wicked this Way Comes (1983). In 1985, Grier made her theatrical debut in Sam Shepard's Fool for Love at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.
Grier returned to film as Steven Seagal's detective partner in Above the Law (1988). She had a recurring role on Miami Vice from 1985 to 1989, and made guest appearances on Martin, Night Court and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She had a recurring role in the TV series Crime Story, between 1986 and 1988. Her role in Rocket Gibraltar (1988) was cut due (according to Grier) to fears by the film's director, Daniel Petrie, of "repercussions from interracial love scenes". She appeared on Sinbad, Preston Chronicles, The Cosby Show, The Wayans Bros., and Mad TV. In 1994, Grier appeared in Snoop Dogg's video for "Doggy Dogg World".
In the late 1990s, Grier was a cast member of the Showtime series Linc's. She appeared in 1996 in John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. and 1997 with the title role in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, films that partly paid homage to her 1970s blaxploitation films. She was nominated for numerous awards for her work in the Tarantino film. Grier appeared on Showtime's The L Word, in which she played Kit Porter. The series ran for six seasons and ended in March 2009. Grier occasionally guest-stars in such television series as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (where she is a recurring character).
In 2010, Grier began appearing in a recurring role on the hit science-fiction series Smallville as the villain Amanda Waller, also known as White Queen, head agent of Checkmate, a covert operations agency. She appeared as a friend and colleague to Julia Roberts' college professor in 2011's Larry Crowne.
In 2010, Grier wrote her memoir, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, with Andrea Cagan.
Grier received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 2011. That same year, she received an honorary Doctorate of Science from Langston University.
Essence magazine wrote in 2012,"So revolutionary were the characters Grier played that women reportedly would stand on chairs and cheer".
Grier founded the Pam Grier Community Garden and Education Center with the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum. The purpose is to teach people about organic gardening, health, and nutrition among other things. The museum named its first garden in honor of Grier in 2011.
In January 2018, Grier said that a biopic based on her memoir is in the works, entitled Pam.
In April 2022, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) announced the fourth season of their podcast, The Plot Thickens…