page_title: Pam Grier
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Pam Grier / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Actress Pam Grier during a June 28, 2013 Q&amp;A panel at the Wizard World New York Experience Comic Con in Manhattan. The moderator on the right is Jarrett Crippen, an Austin, Texas police detective who won the second season of the reality television series that Lee hosts, Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, with his character, the Defuser. This photo was created by Luigi Novi. It is not in the public domain, and use of this file outside of the licensing terms is a copyright violation. If you would like to use this image outside of the Wikimedia projects, you may do so, only if I am properly credited, either by linking the photograph to this page, or with an easily visible credit placed near the photo in each instance in which it is used. Please credit authorship as follows: &#160;© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. Please maintain the original file name in all uses. You can see a gallery of some of my other photos here. If you have any questions, you can contact me by sending me an email or leaving a note at the bottom of my Wikipedia talk page.
context_page_description: Pamela Suzette Grier is an American actress. She achieved fame for her starring roles in a string of 1970s action and blaxploitation films for American International Pictures and New World Pictures, most notably Coffy and Foxy Brown. Her other major films during this period included The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, The Big Bird Cage, Black Mama, White Mama, Scream Blacula Scream, The Arena, Sheba, Baby, Bucktown, and Friday Foster.
  Described by Quentin Tarantino as cinema's first female action star, she starred as the titular character in Tarantino's crime film Jackie Brown, for which she received Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, Satellite Award, and Saturn Award nominations for Best Actress. Grier's subsequent films included Jawbreaker, Bones, Just Wright, Larry Crowne, and Poms.
  On television, Grier portrayed Eleanor Winthrop in the Showtime comedy-drama series Linc's, Kate "Kit" Porter on the Showtime drama series The L Word, and Constance Terry in the ABC sitcom Bless This Mess. She also received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for her work in the animated series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child.
context_section_description: Grier moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1967, where she was initially hired to work the switchboard at American International Pictures (AIP). She is believed to have been discovered by director Jack Hill, who cast her in his women-in-prison films The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972). While under contract at AIP, she became a staple of early 1970s blaxploitation movies, playing big, bold, assertive women, beginning with Jack Hill's Coffy (1973), 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 female to headline an action film, as protagonists of previous blaxploitation films were males. 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.
  Grier subsequently played similar characters in the AIP films Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba, Baby, and Friday Foster (both 1975). With the demise of blaxploitation later in the 1970s, Grier appeared in smaller roles for many years. She acquired progressively larger character roles in the 1980s, including a druggie prostitute in Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), a witch in Something Wicked this Way Comes (1983).
  In 1985, Grier made her theater debut in Sam Sheppard's Fool for Love at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.
  Grier returned to film as Steven Seagal's detective partner in Above the Law (1988). She had a recurring role on Miami Vice from 1985 to 1989 and made guest appearances on Martin, Night Court, and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She had a recurring role in the TV series Crime Story between 1986 and 1988. Her role in Rocket Gibraltar (1988) was cut due to fears by the film's director, Daniel Petrie, of "repercussions from interracial love scenes." She appeared on Sinbad, Preston Chronicles, The Cosby Show, The Wayans Brothers Show, and Mad TV. In 1994, Grier appeared in Snoop Dogg's video for "Doggy Dogg World".
  In the late 1990s Grier was a cast member of the Showtime series Linc's. She appeared in 1996 in John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. and 1997 with the title role in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, films that partly paid homage to her 1970s blaxploitation movies. She was nominated for numerous awards for her work in the Tarantino film. Grier appeared on Showtime's The L Word, in which she played Kit Porter. The series ran for six seasons and ended in March 2009. Grier occasionally guest-stars in such television series as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (where she is a recurring character).
  In 2010 Grier began appearing in a recurring role on the hit science-fiction series Smallville as the villain Amanda Waller, also known as White Queen, head agent of Checkmate, a covert operations agency. She appeared as a friend and colleague to Julia Roberts' college professor in 2011's Larry Crowne.
  In 2010, Grier wrote her memoir, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, with Andrea Cagan. 
  Grier received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 2011. That same year, she received an honorary Doctorate of Science from Langston University. 
  She founded the Pam Grier Community Garden and Education Center with the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum. The purpose is to teach people about organic gardening, health and nutrition among other things. The museum named its first garden in honor of Grier in 2011.
  In January 2018, Grier revealed a biopic based on her memoir is in the works, entitled Pam.
caption: Grier with moderator Jarrett Crippen during a Q&A session at the 2013 Wizard World New York Experience
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA", "Image Make": "OLYMPUS IMAGING CORP.", "Image Model": "E-500", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "314", "Image YResolution": "314", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2013:07:26 10:18:14", "Image ExifOffset": "272", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "774", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5291", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/80", "EXIF FNumber": "18/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Creative", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "250", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:06:28 18:49:41", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:06:28 18:49:41", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "925/256", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash fired, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "43", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3161", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1906", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Manual", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "High gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Hard", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal"}