Pamela Suzette Grier born May 26, is an American actress, singer, and martial artist. Described by Quentin Tarantino as cinema's first female action star, [ 2 ] she achieved fame for her starring roles in a string of s action , blaxploitation and women-in-prison films for American International Pictures and New World Pictures. She portrayed the title character in Quentin Tarantino 's crime film Jackie Brown , nearly three decades after her first starring role.
Grier also appeared in Escape from L. In IndieWire named Grier one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. She has one sister and one brother. Because of her father's military career, the family moved frequently during Grier's childhood. In , they moved to Swindon where her father worked on an air force base. Instead, they'd been raised to hate Germans In the U. Up until , there were department stores in which my father and I weren't even allowed to try on clothing.
While under contract at AIP, she became a staple of early s blaxploitation films, playing bold, assertive women, beginning with Hill's Coffy , in which she plays a nurse who seeks revenge on drug dealers. Her character was advertised in the trailer as the "baddest one-chick hit-squad that ever hit town!
The film, which was filled with sexual and violent elements typical of the genre, was a box-office hit. Grier is considered to be the first African-American woman to headline an action film, as protagonists of previous blaxploitation films were men. In his review of Coffy , critic Roger Ebert praised the film for its believable female lead. He noted that Grier was an actress of "beautiful face and astonishing form" and that she possessed a kind of "physical life" missing from many other attractive actresses.
With the demise of blaxploitation later in the s, Grier appeared in smaller roles for many years. She acquired progressively larger character roles in the s, including a druggie prostitute in Fort Apache, The Bronx and a witch in Something Wicked this Way Comes Grier returned to film as Steven Seagal 's detective partner in Above the Law She had a recurring role in the TV series Crime Story , between and Her role in Rocket Gibraltar was cut due to fears by the film's director, Daniel Petrie , of "repercussions from interracial love scenes".
