Pam Grier: ‘I was part of a female cinematic revolution’
Pam Grier was at the cinema with friends in the early 1990s, watching a violent thriller by a hot young director, when she experienced a minor shock. The motor-mouthed crooks up on the screen were shooting the breeze; their conversation turned to Black female action stars of the 1970s. And suddenly there it was: the name “Pam Grier”, uttered admiringly by Tim Roth and Chris Penn.
“My friends were all standing up and screaming right there in the theatre,” she recalls. And what did she do? “I slid down into my seat. I couldn’t believe they were talking about me.”
The movie was Reservoir Dogs. And its director, Quentin Tarantino, happened to be a devoted connoisseur of Grier’s career: everything from the sweaty, seedy women-in-prison movies she made in the early 1970s, such as The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage, to tough-nosed vigilante action thrillers such as Foxy Brown, in which she secretes a pistol in her afro and dishes out street justice in a variety of groovy threads. Who can forget the matching floral headscarf and balloon-sleeved blouse she wears while confronting her no-good duplicitous brother? “That’s my sister, baby,” he reflects after she has trashed his home. “And she’s a whole lot of woman!”
The 73-year-old actor is speaking from the bucolic setting of her ranch. “The horses
