GRIER’S THE DEAL
On-screen badass is just a country girl at heart
SHE played the “meanest chick in town” in 1974’s “Foxy Brown,” but the real Pam Grier is more of a John Wayne type. A longtime resident of Douglas County, Colo., the original female action star shunned the convenience of Hollywood to live in wilder territory.
“I have to be able to have my horses and dogs and dirt,” the 68-year-old actress tells The Post. “I prefer living here. I’m around rednecks and rebels and rattlesnakes. People who’ve never been around black people. They see me on my tractor, or my horse, and we get to talking, and we realize we’re all the same. They say, ‘I want my child to meet you!’ and call me Auntie Pam.”
Grier, who grew up in Denver, makes frequent trips to Los Angeles for work, however. Her latest film is “Bad Grandmas,” a freewheeling comedy costarring the late Florence Henderson — best known for “The Brady Bunch” — who Grier had befriended on a Hallmark Channel show.
“We were separated at birth!” says Grier. “She was so funny, so generous. When [the ‘Bad Grandmas’ producers] said they were looking at Florence for the part, I screamed. I said, ‘You gotta get her!’”
Foxy Brown and Mrs. Brady were just as bubbly off-camera as on, where their fed-up senior citizen characters, Coralee and Mimi, respectively, along with two other gal pals (Susie Wall and Sally Eaton) smoke pot, down tequila shots and murder a couple of bad guys.
“We’d get to giggling so hard we couldn’t stop,” says Grier, “and then we’d get really salty. Sailor talk. Florence was an absolute joy.”
Beyond working with her friend, Grier says she had always wanted to play a badass grandmother, because those types of women run in her family.
“My grandma and greatgrandma were from the black West, the underground railroad,” she says. “They settled in Wyoming, where all the women were hunting and shooting. They were black Annie Oakleys, black Calamity Janes. My great-grandma was sassy. She had money, and didn’t need a man.” Grier’s mother, who currently lives with her, taught the actress how to shoot a gun, fish and hunt at a young age.
The gunslinging Grier burst onto the film scene in 1973’s “Coffy,” after smaller womenin-prison movie roles; she went on to become the female face of blaxploitation action movies with “Foxy Brown” and 1975’s “Sheba, Baby.” But she faced racial backlash when she tried to move into more serious fare, she says.
In the running for one drama, “I had to deal with Jim Crow. The white male lead looked at my picture and said, ‘This ain’t “The Cosby Show.”’ And that slowed the momentum of going into the mainstream.”
On another film, a Western, “the studio wanted me,” Grier says. “They said, ‘Pam will bring all kinds of character, black box office, black humor.’ And then some white woman — who I thought would be my sister! — said she didn’t want me in it.”
Grier went on to win widespread acclaim for her starring role in Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film “Jackie Brown,” which nodded to her earlier roles.
The actress, who wrote in her 2010 autobiography, “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts,” about being sexually assaulted at the ages of 6 and 20, says she never personally experienced sexual abuse in Hollywood and was grateful to have an agent whom she trusted accompany her to industry parties.
“He made sure they were legit, and he never let me go there alone,” she says. But Grier thinks her action-hero image helped, too. “I think they knew that I would hurt them,” she says of potential predators. “I was gonna whoop some ass.”
Grier recently finished collaborating on a screen adaptation of her memoir. “I’m hoping a woman filmmaker will be involved,” she says. And she’s got some thoughts on actors she’d like to see in it. “I would love to have Taraji P. Henson play my mom. And we’re looking at Jay Pharoah to play Richard Pryor.”
The legendary comedian was one of Grier’s exboyfriends. She loved him, she says, but, “I loved me more. I realized his journey was going to overwhelm me. I was giving up my career and my earnings. So I let him have his journey and his success.”
She also dated basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who, she says, “wanted me to convert to Islam. I studied to be a Muslim woman, I read the Quran. But I couldn’t make Kareem happy like Islam could. So I let him go. He married someone else — on my birthday. That almost killed me. But I said, ‘That’s OK, you have your journey, I have mine.’ ”
She and Henderson, who died of heart failure nearly a year ago at age 82, bonded over the struggle of balancing relationships (Henderson was twice married) and their own careers, especially during the decades when women were often expected to take a back seat to male ambition.
“Success takes a lot of work,” says Grier. “You have to juggle. Florence and I could compare war wounds and talk about what made us stronger. I miss her. We were hoping to go down the road together.”