Pam Grier
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| Tall and voluptuous, the 1970s' Queen of Blaxploitation brought a formidable presence to such formulaic crowd-pleasers as Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba Baby (1975), and others, most of them vengeance-ismine tales loaded with graphic nudity and liberal bloodletting. The cousin of profootballer Roosevelt Grier, Pam actually got her start in babes-in-bonds exploitation epics churned out by Roger Corman's New World. She was launched in The Big Doll House (1971) and was felicitously squared off against the equally statuesque Margaret Markov in Black Mama, White Mama (1972, an outlandish female version ofThe Defiant Ones and The Arena (1974), where they played gladiators in Ancient Rome. She also appeared to good advantage in Scream Blacula Scream (1973) and Bucktown (1975), and tried to broaden her appeal as the comic-strip character Friday Foster (also 1975). But when the blaxploitation genre went into eclipse, so did her career. Grier's performance as the pathetic junkie in Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981) heralded her new career as a character actress, and she has since made impressive appearances portraying a witch in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), no-nonsense cops both serious (1988's Above the Law and comic (1987's The Allnighter and a beleaguered high school teacher in Class of 1999 (1990). |