Pam Grier explains how her acting career impacted Black women
Game Changers is a Yahoo Entertainment interview series highlighting the diverse creators disrupting Hollywood — and the pioneers who paved the way.
Pam Grier shouldn't have to be told that she's a game changer. But the Hollywood icon still looks surprised — and thrilled — when Yahoo Entertainment informs her that she's officially joined our pantheon of barrier-shattering entertainment industry, Game Changers. "I'm a game changer?" the pioneering star of action classics from Foxy Brown to Jackie Brown says with genuine delight. Still, she's not letting that go to her head. "I'm an auntie first," Grier notes with a laugh.
There's a good reason why Grier is humble about her accomplishments: after all, her career speaks for itself. Entering the movie business in the late 1960s as the breakout star of multiple Roger Corman B-movies, the North Carolina-born army brat hit the A-list when the Blaxploitation era of kicked off in earnest in the early ’70s. As movies like Coffy, Friday Foster and Sheba, Baby shot up the box office charts, Grier became Hollywood's leading Black female action star, and attracted attention off-camera as well via a series of high-profile romances with such men as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor.
As the ’80s dawned, Grier explored career paths beyond movies, alternating stage and TV roles with a burgeoning interest in environmentalism and education. Until recently, she lived on a Colorado ranch that hosted a therapeutic riding program for children with autism — the same children that call her "Auntie" — and has also founded community gardens and received honorary doctorates from prominent universities. She's even been immortalized in video game form, appearing as a playable character in an entry of the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise. "I'm a game maker," she jokes.
It's an eventful life story, one that Grier narrates herself in the latest season of TCM's popular documentary podcast, The Plot Thickens. Available now on all major podcast platforms, the series provides a necessary reminder of Grier's importance to shaking up the traditional image of an action hero — not to mention giving voice to a community of women that was historically marginalized in and outside of Hollywood before she broke through.
"I've been developing an audience since 1972 to be prepared for women leadership and women who are authoritative in a culture that had not been listening to women for a very long time," Grier says of her five decade-and-counting life mission. "I believe in our sisterhood and I believe what we do is so important. And we need to continue to move forward because there are so many narratives that have been buried."
As Grier tells it, she originally hoped to be unburying those narratives from behind the camera rather than in front of it. When she arrived in Los Angeles in 1967, the 18-year-old movie lover had dreams of being a filmmaker. "I didn't even know what acting was!" she says now. "I just wanted to get into film school, and there were only a few film schools then." Grier had her sights set on attending one of L.A.'s two premiere film institutions, UCLA and USC — whose respective alums from that period include Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, George Lucas and John Carpenter.
"I had the grades, I just didn't have the money," she recalls about the obstacles blocking her path to film school. "I just wanted to be able to capture [Black] narratives, because I knew so many growing up. I heard a lot of stories that were not in the history books. We've got narratives that are really powerful, and all we need is a way to tell those stories."
Grier likes to say that she "fell on my face" into acting as a way to raise tuition money. "I wore a plaid shirt and boots from Sears — I looked very, very country," she says of her earliest auditions. But that look actually worked in her favor, as casting agents found her to be a "raw and interesting" counterpart to the revolving door of polished performers that walked into their offices day after day. One of those agents connected her with director, producer and self-proclaimed "King of the B's" Roger Corman, who cast her in director Jack Hill's 1971 women in prison movie, The Big Doll House. And with that, her acting career was off and running — although she didn't let go of her filmmaking dreams easily.
"I said, 'I'm really here to get into film school — I don't know anything about being an actor,'" she remembers telling Corman before stepping onto The Big Doll House set. "I told him, 'Roger, before I quit my dream, you have to talk to my mama and see if it's okay. I have to get an education … it's a must.'"
"Roger got me the book, An Actor Prepares, and said, 'Pam, study it,'" Grier continues. "And when I did, I fell upon what acting is: replicating a human being so closely. The goal is to move your audience, and make them have empathy towards you. [Making that movie] was everything you would have in your undergraduate studies thrown into six weeks. And I was earning more for one week of filming than I was working three jobs!"
For the next two years, Grier appeared in multiple Corman-backed “jailsploitation” movies, finally breaking out of the genre with a ferocious lead performance in Hill's 1973 hit Coffy, which caught the rising Blaxploitation wave of independently financed Black-led action movies at exactly the right moment. "People told me, 'Pam, guess what? Coffy just knocked the James Bond movie out of first place,'" she says of the movie's mainstream success. "People would see it seven or eight times, and bring their sons and daughters."
Prior to Coffy, the biggest Blaxploitation hits were male-dominated movies like Shaft and Black Caesar. But Grier's combination of steeliness and sensuality appealed to both male and female moviegoers, sending her subsequent star vehicles like Foxy Brown, Sheba, Baby and Friday Foster to the top of the box office charts. "The theater exhibitors would say, 'Pam, you're gonna create a lot of enemies, because your films stay in the theaters too long,'" she says with a laugh. "We're not talking two weeks — we're talking three our four months. That's a lot of popcorn!"
But even as a proven box office draw, Grier quickly found there were limitations to what she could achieve in Hollywood at the time. At one point, she approached a major studio with a pitch to make a movie about Mary Fields aka Stagecoach Mary, a 19th century mail carrier who was famous throughout the Wild West for her sharpshooting skills. "I walked into the studio with my attorneys and agents," she reveals. "I said, 'This is a really good action picture; I'll play it.' And they said, 'No one's going to believe a Black female stagecoach driver.' We'd like you to keep doing what you're doing.'"
By the end of the decade, Blaxploitation had run its course, leaving many of the genre's stars — including Grier — at a career crossroads. Although she worked steadily in the ’80s and ’90s, she didn't play another title character until Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino's loving 1997 homage to her ’70s heyday. Eight years later, she scored another major late-career role when she joined the hit Showtime series, The L Word, in 2004.
Reflecting on the Blaxploitation movement now, Grier says that moniker undervalued what many of the movies were trying to achieve. "Everyone worked together and we solved problems," she notes. "We didn't sweep them under the rug and act like it was okay to be drug dealers or politicians who were selling out the Black community. You can call it what you want, but we had to own up to our Blackness or whatever was holding us down. Let's deal with the things we can see and relate to."
To this day, Grier remains well aware of the impact movies like Foxy Brown and Friday Foster had on Black women specifically. "I gave them a level of confidence," she says, adding that she still has thousands of ’70s fan letters saved in her personal archives. "A lot of women have told me, 'You made a difference in my life. I don't have to do whatever a man says. I can do things myself.'"
Currently residing in New Mexico, Grier continues to be a regular onscreen presence in major Hollywood productions, from films like Poms to such TV shows as This is Us. And she hasn't lost touch with the 18-year-old who arrived in L.A. all those years ago with dreams of telling stories, not just acting in them. "I wrote a World War II movie," she reveals. "It takes place from 1939 to 1942 and is based on true events. I actually have a handful of films that I've finished writing."
Grier also remains a voracious film watcher, particularly of movies that deal with the areas of Black history that Hollywood previously ignored. She cites Kasi Lemmons's 2019 film, Harriet — starring Cynthia Erivo as famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman — as a movie she's watched over and over again. "Those could have been my films if I had been a filmmaker earlier," she says, happily. "I'm catching up now."
The Plot Thickens is currently available on all major podcast platforms