Grier

As a preteen growing up in Jersey City, New Jersey, Odie Henderson saw a tremendous number of wildly inappropriate movies. Take age 4, an especially big, bad year for Henderson and inarguably too young to be eye-mauled by “The Exorcist.” But there was also that time the future Boston Globe film critic and author of the new book “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema” saw a double bill of “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown,” starring Pam Grier. Grier figures prominently in Henderson’s book, published…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freePam Grier has explained why her performance in Jackie Brown left her “exhausted”.Grier stars as the titular character in Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film about a flight attendant (Grier) who works as a smuggler for Ordell Robbie (Samuel L Jackson), an arms trafficker.In a new interview for the film’s 25th anniversary, Grier said that her initial reaction to the script hadn’t been a…

In the media firestorm that Jennifer Lawrence ignited this week, referring to herself as Hollywood’s first female action star for starring in the “Hunger Games” franchise, she and some of the people jumping on Twitter to correct her forgot about the woman who arguably deserves that distinction: pioneering Black actor Pam Grier. Known as the “Queen of Blaxploitation,” Grier broke ground in Hollywood by fronting a series of low-budget action movies in the early 1970s, such as “Foxy Brown,” “Coffy” and “Friday Foster.” Now…

Pam Grier was at the cinema with friends in the early 1990s, watching a violent thriller by a hot young director, when she experienced a minor shock. The motor-mouthed crooks up on the screen were shooting the breeze; their conversation turned to Black female action stars of the 1970s. And suddenly there it was: the name “Pam Grier”, uttered admiringly by Tim Roth and Chris Penn.“My friends were all standing up and screaming right there in the theatre,” she recalls. And what did she do? “I slid down into my seat. I…