Pam Grier: Movie legend is more than a ‘strong Black figure’

By Charles Hallman

Staff Writer

While in the Twin Cities recently, actress Pam Grier was asked did she ever imagine her iconic impact.

“I didn’t have a crystal ball,” responded Grier, who was the first Black woman to make the cover of Ms. Magazine (August 1975), named as one of the “100 Most Fascinating Women of the 20th Century” by Ebony, and once nominated for a Golden Globe and an NAACP Image Award as well. She also sang backup for Bobby Womack while a student at UCLA.

Grier was in town in May for a one-night appearance for the Twin Cities Black Film Festival Presents: An Evening with Foxy Brown, a kick-off event for the annual festival scheduled for September 15-17. “This is the first time that the Twin Cities Black Film Festival has brought someone of this magnitude,” noted Festival Founder-Director Natalie Morrow, “a living legend…an icon. She’s just awesome to talk to, wonderful and very friendly.”

The actress talked about her legendary career in the second part of a two-part interview with the MSR.

During the 1980s, Grier made frequent appearances on such television shows as Miami Vice, played an evil witch in a Walt Disney movie — Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) — and was Steven Seagal’s detective partner in Above the Law (1988). She also did supporting roles in films such as Mars Attacks! (1996), In Too Deep (1999) and Jawbreaker (1999).

But it was Grier’s iconic “baddest one-chick hit squad” on-screen persona that a new generation of movie goers discovered in director Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) that paid homage to her earlier 1970s action roles. As lead character in a star-studded cast that featured Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro, she played a middle-aged flight attendant who is caught smuggling money into the country from Mexico.

The Tarantino film was from an Elmore Leonard novel, but the famed director changed the title (Rum Punch) and lead character, Jackie Burke, a White woman, and adapted it especially for Grier, who previously had played in three Shakespearean plays.

“Quentin told me that if I hadn’t done theater, he probably would not have written Jackie Brown for me. But he heard about my theater credits,” noted the actress who three years earlier had auditioned for another Tarantino film, Pulp Fiction, but didn’t land the role.

Another role she didn’t get was the lead in What’s Love Got to Do with It. Because she had once worked with Laurence Fishburne on Broadway, Grier said she knew the proposed paring wouldn’t work on screen.

“Tina Turner is five feet [tall]!” she exclaimed. “I’m 5’-8”. We’re both in sandals and I am looking at [Fishburne] dead in the eyes. If I put high heels on, I will look on top of his forehead.

“I said ‘No thank you. Thank you for considering me, but I am too tall to play Tina,’” she said smiling.

All through her four-decade career, Grier said she approached every role with as much reality as possible. “In the interrogation scene that I did with Michael Keaton, I sat there for eight hours and didn’t move,” she recalled of a scene in Jackie Brown. “You don’t get to go to the bathroom — you just sit there and they [interrogators] squeeze you until you break. That’s what I wanted — that feeling for the audience [and] the camera. I wanted to create the tension of an interrogation scene.”

She paid the same attention to detail in her role as Tina, the straight sister of a lesbian in Showtime’s The L Word (2004-09). While preparing for it, she was told, “‘You will make fun of us.’ The lesbian community didn’t trust me. I said, ‘No — I’m on your side.’ What if I had a lesbian daughter? I would want her to have the best opportunity for education and to be a citizen of the world, and I would protect her with my life.”

On the state of Black acting today, “It’s all money — it’s a business,” Grier said simply. However, she believes that new technology has helped open more doors for Black actors and actresses. “Soon there will be whole movies on the Internet from all over the world,” said Grier, who was a regular on Showtime’s Linc’s (1999), a comedy set in a Washington, D.C. bar owned by a Black man. “It was the first comedy series without a laugh track,” the actress said proudly. “The writing was brilliant.”

“Thank God for cable,” added Grier. “But my question that I ask — how come we don’t have one Black network — and no one seems to have the answer. We have so many great stories to tell today, historically and politically.”

Whether on screen or in real life, Grier has been a survivor. She was told she had 18 months to live after being diagnosed with cancer in 1988. Years earlier when her film career was just starting on its legendary journey in the 1970s, she contracted a deadly tropical disease, lost her hair, was temporarily blind and almost died while working on two films in the Philippines. The ordeal took her nearly a year to recover.

Now with her total roles in both movies and television nearing the half-century mark, Grier hasn’t stopped yet. She portrayed Queen Latifah’s mother in Just Wright (2010) and released her memoir, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, which was nominated for best memoir honors at the 2010 The African American Literary Awards.

“I’m not worn down at all,” surmised Grier.

In a 2006 Atlanta Journal-Constitution interview, Grier talked about how she is seemingly most known “as a strong Black figure,” but the actress admitted she rather be known for something a bit more than this. “Basically I care about other people,” concluded Grier. “I care about our fragmented community.”

Grier advised everyone “to get off our lazy duffs, butts or whatever else behind and do something, and stop sitting back and letting other people do it. I think we all got lazy.”

Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses to challman@spokesman-recorder.com.