Actress Pam Grier is proud of her career that started with the so-called Blaxploitation era in the early 1970s. She says Hollywood is a ‘mythological idea. If it doesn’t’ reflect our cultures, then it’s not going to survive.’
Courtesy photo
By Bill Vaughan
Entertainment Writer
“I try to bring culture to my work. I reach deep into my creative to bring a culture to my character,” said iconic actress PAM GRIER of her craft to TASTY CLIPS in 2019. “My great grandmother and grandfather were Cheyenne, Wyoming sugar beets farmers. They taught all of us girls how to hunt, fish, shoot and to be resourceful. Those kinds of management skills helped me to have 50 years in the film industry.”
The actress who shot to stardom in the 1970s with films like “Coffy,” “Foxy Brown,” “Friday Foster,” and later “Fort Apache the Bronx,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Just Wright,” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” grew up as a military brat and now lives in southern Colorado.
Grier says she was exposed to rural and urban environments which helped guide her as a liberated woman embracing her femininity yet allowed her to learn how to fix things and speak John Deere.
“Many different cultures are living and are returning to the heartland with fuchsia and purple and pink dreadlocks,” she explained. “Everyone has chicken coops now. They wonder why people ain’t spending that much money anymore. They’re saving it. They don’t have to work as hard to waste it and find out they don’t like that it comes from another country and they’re throwing it in the trash.”
The ambassador for the Brown Sugar streaming service was having meetings on turning her prolific best-selling memoir “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts,” into a feature film.
“I’d love to have Idris Elba to play Daddy Ray, my grandfather and Jay Pharoah to play [former boyfriend] Richard Pryor,” Grier said. “We don’t know who’s going to play me because I’ve had traumatic experiences in my life that are in the screenplay. There are some actresses who had similar events but may not want to play that. People don’t think profoundly of why an actor takes on a role or doesn’t. Many of them can revisit a traumatic experience in their life and many cannot and may not talk about it.”
One role that the statuesque beauty coveted and pitched to several studios in the past was that of Mary Fields, the first stagecoach driver for the mail route in Montana in 1868.
“They just said no one’s going to believe a Black stagecoach driver that’s a woman and it didn’t get made,” she said of her efforts. “I [even] tried to get to certain Black actresses who were very prominent at the time and their agents blocked it. It will get done when it gets done.
“Hollywood is a mythological idea. If it doesn’t’ reflect our cultures, then it’s not going to survive. So that’s what it does or attempts to do. People want to go to see themselves or see fantasy. They understand that. Hollywood is an industry that’s really private. It’s an art colony for me. I just come for a cultural mindset.”
Regarding becoming older in an industry that favors the young, Grier opined that “Once you’re confident with yourself, you’ll be able to embrace outside of you. In Hollywood, it’s been ‘Does an icon age? Can she put on weight?’
“I put on weight for my roles. They don’t want me to wear gray hair because ‘We don’t want you to look old. We want you to be timeless.’ I understand that and it’s not judgment if they’re giving me a role to prepare, but I can’t wait to be gray. I started wearing gray hair and platinum hair and then everyone started to do it as a trend.”
She revealed that she had an interchange on social media with slain activist/rapper Nipsey Hussle about helping gang members to neutralize themselves and get into the workforce.
“It’s very difficult when many of them had felonies at the age of 15, because they can’t be insured or bonded,” Grier said. “So how do they start their own companies? We talked about that. He was doing great things and was always saying something very witty and philosophic. It’s very sad that one of his friends — someone he knew — was his assassin.
“Different cultures, especially African Americans, are divided, and if you go religiously, we’re divided even more,” she said. “I do want our children to be respectful of mamas and papas. I go nuts over that. To respect people who walk by who were almost lynched themselves. I can be very conservative and maybe fundamental, but I’m not a person who has to demand to suppress your religion.”
On her legacy, the big, tall country girl who was 6-2 in high heels believes she will be an icon to those who consider her as an independent who stepped into men’s shoes and did the work.
“[Only] I didn’t step in men’s shoes,” said Grier, correcting the record. “I stayed in my own little women’s shoes, and I got dirty and worked harder.”
For more than 11 years, Bill Vaughan has kept Wave readers up to date with the latest news in entertainment. Now, we are collecting some of those past columns into what we call the Best of Tasty Clips. To contact Vaughan, visit his social media pages on Facebook and Instagram or @tasty_clips, on X @tastyclips, and on LinkedIn to William Vaughan.
