Pam Grier (1949- )

October 20, 2010 
/ Contributed By: Michelle Granshaw

Pam Grier

Courtesy Canadian Film Centre

Actress Pam Grier is best known for her portrayal of tough and sexy crimefighters in the 1970s genre of “blaxploitation” films. Her later work in the 1998 film Jackie Brown earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

Pamela Suzette Grier was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on May 26, 1949. Her father was a mechanic with the U.S. Air Force, and when Pam was five the family transferred to a military base in Swindon, England. She recently revealed in her autobiography that during this time she was sexually assaulted, an event that left her traumatized and isolated throughout her childhood.

For the next eight years, the family moved around Europe, eventually settling in Denver, Colorado. At Denver’s East High School, Pam played organ and piano for the school’s Echoes of Youth Gospel Choir alongside Philip Bailey, Larry Dun, and Andrew Woolfolk, who would later form the R & B/funk powerhouse Earth, Wind & Fire.

Grier enrolled in Denver’s Metropolitan State College in 1967, planning on a career in medicine. To earn tuition for her second year of college, she entered beauty contests, placing second runner-up in the 1967 Miss Colorado pageant. An agent encouraged her to pursue acting, and in 1968 she moved to Los Angeles where she lived with her aunt and cousin, pro football player and actor Roosevelt (Rosey) Grier.

In Los Angeles, Grier worked as a receptionist and switchboard operator at the American International Pictures studio. She also attended acting classes and auditions and in 1969 landed a role in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Her role in Coffy (1973) made her a national star and earned her a multi-picture contract with American International Pictures. Over the next decade, she would star in a number of blaxploitation films, including Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba, Baby (1975), and Friday Foster (1975). Although Grier played a variety of characters, she became known for portraying strong, active sex symbols.

In the late 1970s, Grier attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied directing and producing with director Roman Polanski. She also formed the production company Brown Sun Productions. Grier continued acting but moved away from the action roles that had become her signature. She appeared in Greased Lightning (1977), Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), Something Wicked this Way Comes (1983), and Above the Law (1988). Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, she also performed in television and stage productions, including Roots: The Next Generations (1979).

Nearly three decades after her film debut, Grier experienced a career revival when she starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997). The role earned her National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award and Golden Globe Award nominations. Grier has remained active during the past decade with numerous film and TV roles. She never married and now divides her time between Denver and Los Angeles.

About the Author

Author Profile

Michelle Granshaw is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. She is affiliate faculty with the Global Studies Center, the European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center, Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies Program, and Cultural Studies. At Pitt, she teaches in the BA, MFA, and PhD programs and mentors student dramaturgs. Granshaw was honored to receive the University of Pittsburgh’s 2021 Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award.

As a cultural historian, her research focuses on disenfranchised, and migrant communities and how they shaped and were influenced by the embodied and imaginative practices within theatre and performance. Her research interests include U.S. theatre, popular entertainment, and performance; performances of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; global and diasporic performance; and historiography.

Granshaw’s articles have appeared in Theatre Survey, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Popular Entertainment Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Topics, and the New England Theatre Journal. In 2014, Granshaw was awarded the American Theatre and Drama Society Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication for her Theatre Survey (January 2014) article “The Mysterious Victory of the Newsboys: The Grand Duke Theatre’s 1874 Challenge to the Theatre Licensing Law.” Her book, Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 2019) argues that nineteenth-century American variety theatre formed a crucial battleground for anxieties about mobility, immigration, and ethnic community in the United States. It was named a finalist for the 2019 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Book Award and supported by grants and fellowships including the Hibernian Research Award from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, American Theatre and Drama Society Faculty Travel Award, and Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship. “Inventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage,” part of Irish on the Move’sfirst chapter, also won the 2018 Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Currently, she is working on a new monograph titled The Fight for Desegregation: Race, Freedom, and the Theatre After the Civil War. In November 2022, she received an American Society for Theatre Research Research Fellowship in support of the project.

Granshaw currently serves on the Executive Board for the American Theatre and Drama Society (term 2021-5) and co-organizes ATDS’s First Book Bootcamp and Career Conversations series.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Granshaw, M. (2010, October 20). Pam Grier (1949- ). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/grier-pam-1949/

Source of the Author's Information:

Pam Grier and Andrea Cagan, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts (New York: Springboard Press, 2010); Sharon D. Johnson, “Pam Grier,” in African American National Biography: Volume Three, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Louie Robinson, “Pam Grier: More than just a sex symbol,” Ebony, June 1976.

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