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Grier, Pam
(26 May 1949– ), film and television actress, was born Pamela Suzette Grier in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the second of four children of Clarence Grier, an air force mechanic, and Gwendolyn (Samuels) Grier, a nurse from rural Wyoming whose great-grandfather owned the Davis Hotel, a hotel for blacks and Chinese railroad workers. Grier's father was transferred to a military base in Swindon, England, and moved the family there when Grier was five years old. After living on American military bases in England, then Germany, the family returned to the United States in 1962 and settled in Denver, Colorado. Grier began attending Smiley Junior High School and became a track star there. She later attended the city's East High School and joined the Echoes of Youth gospel choir, where she played organ and piano with future Earth, Wind and Fire band members Philip Bailey, Larry Dunn, and Andrew Woolfolk.Grier entered Denver's Metropolitan State College in 1967 at age eighteen with the intention of eventually becoming a doctor. During her freshman year she was offered a spot as a Denver Broncos cheerleader. Instead Grier entered the Miss Colorado beauty pageant in order to win prize money that would cover expenses for a second year of college. Although she did not win the pageant, she won the swimsuit competition and the talent segment for her singing and dancing. David Baumgarten, then head of the Agency for the Performing Arts (APA), was in the audience and suggested to Grier that she pursue an acting career in Hollywood. Grier left Colorado for Los Angeles, where she lived in her aunt's garage and began working as a switchboard operator at APA while Baumgarten sent her to acting classes and auditions. According to the writer Jamaica Kincaid, during those early forays in the entertainment industry in the late 1960s one of the criticisms Grier would often hear from producers who decided against hiring her was that she was not “Negro enough.” Ironically Grier would soon become an icon of black power on screen.Grier eventually got a job as a switchboard operator at American International Pictures, where she met the B movie producer and director Roger Corman. In 1969 she was cast in a minor role in his film The Big Bird Cage, followed by small parts in The Big Doll House, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Women in Cages, all commonly known as “babes in bondage” or “sexploitation” films. Corman eventually cast Grier in the pivotal role of her career, as the leading character Lee Daniels in the 1972 film Black Mama, White Mama. A broadly based “female” version of the film The Defiant Ones, Black Mama, White Mama got Grier noticed as the gritty black heroine, an image that fit perfectly with the 1970s blaxploitation film era. Fueled by the civil rights and Black Power movements, these films successfully showcased black characters, normally male, that avenged white injustice and redeemed and restored the black community with fearlessness, righteous aggression, and no small dose of sexual potency. For Grier this translated into starring roles in the classic blaxploitation films Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba, Baby (1975), and Friday Foster (1975). The film historian Donald Bogle notes in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (2001) that Grier was “the first black woman to rise to stardom through B movies” (251). Grier's success, influence, and iconic persona even struck a chord with white feminists. She became the first African American woman to be featured on the cover of Ms. magazine, in the August 1975 issue.
Pam Grier, photographed at an unknown location in 1974. (AP Images.)
Further Reading
- Ascher-Walsh, Rebecca. “Rosy Grier,” Entertainment Weekly (19 Dec. 1997).
- Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (2001).
- Kincaid, Jamaica. “Pam Grier: The Mocha Mogul of Hollywood,” Ms. (Aug. 1975).
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