“I have this Forrest Gump-ian way of touching something and it becomes a hit!”
Pam Grierisn’t afraid to tell it like it is.
“Sometimes you just have to do it build it and they will come.”
Pam Grier.Everett Collection
“It might win me that Oscar, but I’m not here for awards.
I’m here to have people think and reconsider their thoughts and judgments.”
“Roger Corman said, ‘Can you read?’
Judith Brown and Pam Grier in ‘The Big Doll House’.Everett Collection
and I said, ‘I’m a college student.
I can read,'” she remembers.
“He says, ‘No, can you read a script?’
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I say, ‘I’ve never seen a script before.'”
She read it cover to cover and still uses those methods in her acting today.
“I learned Tagalog just to be able to figure out what they were saying.
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But I could pick him up and throw him across the room.”
The poster alone became iconic.
“They made me look good,” she says of the one-sheet.
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“They gave me a six pack.”
“Nobody could do nothing with it,” she says of her hair.
“[I told the producers,] ‘Just leave it alone.
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I’ll shampoo it, pick it out, and there we go.’
I showed them how to cut it and how to match shots out of sequence.
But this time she based the character on her aunt.
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“Foxy was strategically more radical and aggressive,” says Grier.
“I wanted to show that side of womanhood.
She was way ahead of her time.”
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Grier remembers it was a very DIY effect.
“It was more of like a slinky covered in silly putty.
But it was the implication of it.”
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“I just wanted to sit at her feet and listen to hear narratives,” Grier gushes.
“People who have that knowledge and wisdom, you want to learn from them.
I wanted her to have my dressing room.
Kyle Bono Kaplan/STXfilms
I wanted her to have anything she wanted.
She opened doors for me, and I knew I could learn from her.
It was wondrous.”
“And they said, ‘Why?’
and I said, ‘No, I can be a love interest at any time.'”
They were even planning to adapt and star in James Hathaway’sSilencetogether at one time.
“His eyes were stone ass blue,” she says.
“He’d take me to lunch on Staten Island, and we talked about a lot of things.
He gave me strength.
He said, ‘Acting is about our humanness.’
He gave me unbelievable knowledge.”
Most notably, she recurred as Tubbs’ girlfriend, Valerie Gordon, an NYPD officer, onMiami Vice.
“Philip Michael Thomas’birthday is the same day as mine,” she notes.
“But I wanted to work with a very aggressive, radical director and producer,Michael Mann.
He was cutting edge.”
Quentin Tarantino adaptedElmore Leonard’sRum Punchspecifically for Grier as an homage to her Blaxpoitation films.
She says the experience was both the most rewarding and difficult of her life.
“She has to speak fast withSam Jackson’s Ordell,” she explains, as an example.
I’m going to kill myself!’
I said, ‘Quentin, I’m going to fall.
He talks so fast!”
Grier admits the role terrified her, but that she took it to avoid atrophying as an actor.
“I was ready to work with Quentin and give him what he needed,” she reflects.
“He only uses one or two takes.
While playing Kit Porter, half-sister toJennifer Beals’Bette, Grier created her own backstory for their childhood.
“And Bette always wanted to be the man and had this aura of being very masculine and dominant.
And I knew that she was different, and I wanted to make her happy and safe.”
“I have a film that I wanted to write aboutThe L Wordgirls,” she says.
“I had written a story that I ran by [creator Kathy Greenberg].
It’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie, not a series.
So I might get that done.”
It will be exhausting,'” she explains.
“But then I said, ‘I’ll sleep at lunchtime.
I’ve got to work with Diane Keaton.’
Did you want to hit him back?’
Because if it was me, I would’ve slapped the holy s— out of him.
We’d still be rocking and rolling in that room!”
