Grier, Pam 1949–

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Pam Grier 1949–

Actress

Established Reputation in Blaxploitation

Film critic Roger Ebert, in his Movie Home Companion, referred to Pam Grier as “one of the most intriguing action stars of the 1970s.” Though she continued to work in the ensuing decades, Grier established herself as a box-office draw in the “blaxploitation” genre, generally playing tough, sexy crimefighters. Vibe’s Darius James— an expert on the genre—rhapsodized, “Grier reigned over the altars of adolescent onanism in a dangerous double-D cup like a black-skinned [Hindu religion deity of destruction] goddess Kali.”

Some 20 years earlier, Ms. contributor Jamaica Kincaid dismissed the films themselves as “mostly simplistic, sensational, violent, and technically faulty” but celebrated their presentation of “a woman who is independent, resourceful, self-confident, strong, and courageous. Above all, they are the only films to show us a woman who triumphs!” Yet rather than be hemmed in by such roles, Grier took a break from her film career that began to look like retirement until she returned in a challenging, unglamorous role in 1981’s Fort Apache: The Bronx. Since then she has pursued a variety of film and television work, though 1970s nostalgia has only made her blaxploitation heroines—Friday Foster, Coffy, Foxy Brown, and others—loom ever larger.

“When I was a young girl, I never thought of acting,” Pamala Suzette Grier claimed in an Ebony profile. “I never thought of television, of fans, movie stars, signing autographs. It never crossed my mind.” She was born in Winston-Salem, South Carolina; her father’s military job kept the family traveling, and she grew up in Europe, returning to the United States when she was 14.

Military jargon prevailed even at home: “It was a [totally] different mentality, a way of life,” she told Los Angeles Times writer Bob Ellison. “Like, ‘Daddy, can I go to the movies?’ ‘Negative!’ ‘Why can’t you say ‘No,’ like anybody else’s father?’ He’d say ‘Negative!’ or ‘Affirmative.” ’ They settled in Denver, Colorado, which she described to Kincaid as “rough.” With her slight English accent, fastidious manners, hand-me-down clothes, and fondness for afternoon tea, she scarcely fit in with her peers. “I wasn’t popular with boys, and I almost didn’t have a date for the senior prom,” she recalled. “I felt strange, and I just couldn’t find a balance.”

Having enrolled at Denver’s Metropolitan State College, Grier envisioned a career in medicine. It was the death of her boyfriend in the Vietnam war that made her consider acting, as she explained to the Los Angeles Times, for the

At a Glance…

Born Pamala Suzette Grier, May 26,1949, in Winston-Salem, NC; daughter of a U.S. Air Force maintenance mechanic. Education: Attended Metropolitan State College, Denver, CO.

Worked as switchboard operator at talent agency and American International Pictures, c. 1969. Film appearances include The Big Bird Cage, 1969; Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, 1969; Black Mama, White Mama, 1972; Scream, Blacula, Scream, 1973; Coffy, 1973; Foxy Brown, 1974; Friday Foster, 1975; Sheba, Baby, 1975; Drum, 1976; Greased Lightning, 1977; Fort Apache: The Bronx, 1981; Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1983; Stand Alone, 1985; On the Edge, 1986; Tough Enough, 1987; Above the Law, 1988; Class of 1999, 1989; Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, 1991; and Posse, 1994. Television appearances include Badge of the Assassin, The Elizabeth Morgan Story, Miami Vice, Knots Landing, Frank’s Place, The Cosby Show, and Monsters. Stage appearances include Fool for Love, Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune, and The Piano Lesson.

Awards: NAACP Image Award for best actress, 1986, for Fool for Love; National Black Theatre Festival Achievement Award and African American Film Society Achievement Award, both 1993.

Addresses: Agent —The Irv Schecter Company, 9300 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90212.

catharsis it allowed. High tuition costs, meanwhile, drove her to enter the Miss Colorado Universe contest in hopes of winning prize money. As the only black contestant, in 1967, she knew she faced an uphill battle; though she did not win, she placed second and attracted the attention of agent David Baumgarten, who handled comedians Rowan & Martin, among others. Baumgarten invited her to Hollywood, having immediately recognized her star quality. In a reversal of the traditional story, Grier was disinclined to go, but she was encouraged by her mother to take the agent up on his offer.

Recognized As a Natural

Signed to his Agency of the Performing Arts, Grier attended acting classes and worked the office switchboard. But the film roles didn’t come; eventually she took a switchboard operator job at the famed low-budget studio American International Pictures (AIP), earning a higher salary. She claimed to be well versed in AIP’s more complicated system, then came in early to work every day until she learned it. She also uncovered a great deal about the film business by listening in on the calls she routed.

Eventually she visited producer Roger Corman—arguably the era’s king of bare-bones moviemaking—and asked for a part in his film The Big Bird Cage. She landed a small role. “I thought she had everything we were looking for in an actress to play in our action-adventure films,” Corman recalled to Moviegoer years later. “She was a big, good-looking girl with a lot of energy, and I knew those qualities would come through on the screen. She was an untrained actress, but she always had a natural ability. And as she learned she became very skilled.”

Even so, the education came at a price—minor parts in “B” pictures like Twilight People and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls —before Grier secured a lead in Black Mama, White Mama, a prison escape melodrama loosely modeled on the Tony Curtis-Sidney Poitier vehicle The Defiant Ones. This Corman outing got Grier noticed, and she went on to stardom in the burgeoning black exploitation, or “blaxploitation,” field.

Established Reputation in Blaxploitation

After hits like Shaft and Superfly demonstrated the box-office potential of black-themed action pictures, the market was more or less flooded with attempts to cash in. Aside from the profitable Cleopatra Jones, starring Tamara Dobson—with whom Grier has often been confused—nearly all the blaxploitation features with a female lead starred Grier. In Coffy, she portrays a nurse who takes revenge on the drug dealers who destroy her sister; the film is often remembered for the title character’s emasculation of her adversaries with a shotgun. As Foxy Brown she arranges the castration of a nemesis and sends the severed member to his girlfriend, while Sheba, Baby concludes with Grier’s character dispatching the primary evildoer with a speargun.

Alongside her starring roles in action vehicles were appearances in such fare as the black horror sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream and the plantation melodrama sequel Drum, which VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever described as “bad taste at its best.” Yet Grier had become that rarity—a bankable female star. Only Barbara Streisand and Liza Minelli shared that distinction during the 1970s. Ebert, quoted in Moviegoer, compared Grier to venerable action hero and dramatic star “Sean Connery, in that she knows how to keep her action in character, make it believable. She remained likable in those roles while doing some truly horrible things to her enemies. She should have done them to her directors.”

It was a formative period for modern feminism, but Grier’s tough-sexy image was sufficiently malleable to accommodate both a cover story in feminist journal Ms. and a pictorial in Playboy. Her self-sufficient heroines managed to commit their mayhem in skimpy outfits and usually enjoyed a tender tryst with a sensitive man, thus staying within the realm of acceptability for the largely male audience her films attracted.

Grier herself expressed dissatisfaction with AIP ’s editing of her films, complaining to Ms. that the company took Coffy and “cut it up—taking out the most important parts, like tender scenes between me and my sister. So all you see is bang, bang, bang, shoot ’em up tits and ass, bang, bang, bang, shoot ’em up tits and ass. But they kept saying, people will love it now. It’s entertainment.” She added, “AIP policy is to give the niggers shit.” Even so, she insisted to Stephen Farber of Moviegoer years later, “I learned a lot about the business from making those movies.”

She moved in a more conventionally dramatic direction for 1977’s Greased Lightning, portraying the wife of a race-car driver played by Richard Pryor. It was a small role in a critically praised but relatively minor film, but it initiated a romantic relationship between Grier and Pryor; the actor-comedian encouraged her to expand her repertoire. Despite admonitions that she was endangering her career, she began turning down work. “I said, ‘I think I’ll sit back and see who I am, see if I want to remain in the business—and on whose terms,’” she told Farber. “Everyone warned me that it’s usually hard to make a comeback when you drop out. I said, ‘Well, if I want it that badly, I’ll just have to work real hard, won’t I?’”

“I played those [Coffy -type] parts because they had women in positions of power,” Grier told Los Angeles Times contributor Dennis Hunt. “It was a good positive image for black women. But the films became redundant, and I don’t like being redundant.” As it turned out, Grier jumped off the blaxploitation ship just before it began to sink; by the late 1970s, box-office returns for “ghetto” action films were virtually nonexistent. Unfortunately, so were roles for the performers who had helped create the genre. Rather than lobby for acting work, however, Grier pursued other interests, among them intensive dance training, singing, and piano; aside from appearances on television’s Love Boat and the Roots II miniseries, little was heard from her during this period.

Death of Friend Marked Return to Acting

It was the loss of a friend, singer Minnie Riperton, that drove her back to film work. “I watched Minnie struggle with cancer for a year and a half,” Grier recounted to Farber. “I saw her trying to make her last album in extreme pain, raising her family at the same time, loving and giving and sharing without one complaint. She said to me, ‘We live such a very short time. You have a lot to give, and you should be giving.’ So just from watching her try to live and live fully, I started to realize a lot about myself. After she died, I withdrew for several months. But when I came out of it, I decided to go back to work.”

This time, however, Grier asked her agent to seek more demanding roles; soon she was offered the part of a murderous, drug-addicted prostitute in the drama Fort Apache: The Bronx. “If people thought of me as glamorous before,” she told Hunt, “they will change their minds after seeing this film.” She called the part “the hardest role I’ve ever played and I couldn’t have played it as effectively without getting really into the character. I’ve never gotten that deeply [into] a character before.” Her preparation, by her own reckoning, required radical self-neglect. “I stopped shaving. I let the hair grow under my arms and on my legs. I painted my nails and let it chip away. During the three months of shooting I wasn’t getting much sleep. I was losing weight. I was eating a pizza a day to keep weight on, but it wasn’t working. I was so skinny in the film you can almost see my jawbones sometimes. People thought makeup made me look that way but it wasn’t makeup. Those dark circles were real. My friends thought I was sick. They said I looked like death.”

Grier also researched her character by hanging out on the street, lingering long enough to blend in and acquire “her [character’s] moves, her attitude and everything else about her.” Farber quoted venerable New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s remark that “each time Pam Grier’s angel-dusted hooker appears, making snaky movements with her tongue, she gives us a feeling of obscene terror.” For his part, Hunt called the actress’s performance “stunning.”

The success of this performance led to appearances in Tough Enough and the Disney screen adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s fantasy-horror novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. The latter allowed her to play the Dust Witch, a belly dancer. She told Moviegoer’s Farber that Bradbury is one of her favorite science fiction authors and that she enjoyed working with both Disney and the splendor of her character. “What a great fantasy, to play someone described as the most beautiful woman in the world!” Director Jack Clayton explained, “Pam was the most exotic person I could find. So we changed the character to a black lady. I chose her because she was beautiful and strange and exotic. She has remarkable presence, but she doesn’t have to depend on that. She is also a very good actress.”

Grier worked sporadically during the rest of the 1980s, appearing as Steven Seagal’s partner in Above the Law, as Bruce Dern’s lover in On the Edge, and on television’s Miami Vice. She also appeared onstage in Los Angeles in the acclaimed Sam Shepard play Fool for Love, for which she was honored with an NAACP Image Award for best actress. By the 1990s, Grier’s cult status—thanks to the roles she’d spent two decades trying to transcend—was assured. Noted filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, whose work owes a substantial debt to 1970s exploitation films, is among her many admirers. Yet she has settled for small roles in films like Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, Class of 1999, and the all-black western Posse. She told Farber that the lack of leading roles “doesn’t disturb me. I feel that even in a small part, people will see my work. The performance isn’t judged by the size of the role.”