August 4, 1996 By LOUIS B. HOBSON --

BEVERLY HILLS -- The '70s have come and gone but Pam Grier is still one foxy lady.

From 1974 through to 1978, Grier was the queen of black exploitation films. She was Coffy, Foxy Brown, Sheba Baby and Friday Foster.

She was the woman men feared as much as they desired.

"It was quite a transformation for a little country girl from Colorado," admits Grier, who stars as the alluring but sexually ambiguous Hershe in Escape From Los Angeles.

"I moved to L.A. when I was 18 to become a film production assistant. I was an angry thing. I really personified what was going on in the heads of women, and particularly black women.

"We wanted to be treated as equals. I thought that meant completely suppressing my feminine side. I dressed like a man, cussed like a man and hung out with the guys," she recalls.

Then came Grier's big break. Roger Corman, the king of B-grade movies, offered her a small role in his 1971 prison sexploitation movie The Big Dollhouse.

"Roger said he liked my in-your-face attitude and wanted to put it on camera. I told him I didn't want to be an actress.

"He offered me $500 a week for six weeks. I was pulling in $30 so I decided maybe the acting thing wasn't so bad."

The acting thing made Grier a bona fide star of low-budget action movies. Except for appearances on African-American TV sitcoms, Grier all but vanished.

The '90s coaxed her back with roles in Posse, Original Gangstas and Escape From Los Angeles. "(Director) John Carpenter called to ask if I'd be interested in playing a transsexual. I thought, if Wesley Snipes can play a woman (in To Wong Foo), I can play a a woman playing a man playing a woman."

After the role was hers, Grier began renting as many macho action movies as she could. "I watched everything Wesley, Arnold (Schwarzenegger) and Bruce (Willis) did. I wanted to learn how they swagger and how they talk. I kept a punching bag in my dressing trailer and I went around the set slapping everybody on the back or punching them in the arm."

Grier supplied all her own dialogue, which Carpenter than altered electronically to make it sound even deeper.

"All my early years of playing macho paid off," says Grier, who adds there was another reason she felt perfect for the role of Hershe. "I escaped from L.A. in 1981 and have never looked back. I was living in Westwood at the time in a beautiful home I'd bought myself. Two cops tried to arrest me one day. They said I fit the description of a black woman burglarizing the neighborhood. They treated me like dirt so I knew it was time to get out of town, and quick."

Grier went back to a ranch in Colorado. "I drive a truck and have dog hair all over my jeans. At heart, I'm still the country girl that my grandfather taught to hunt and fish."

Though she's had her share of boyfriends, Grier has never come close to what she calls a serious relationship. "I usually scared the guys because I was as macho as they were. It's taken a long time but I've finally learned to suppress my male side.

"It didn't help that I came from a single-parent family and didn't have good role models for relationships. I've been learning all on my own. I could very well be married by next year."

Grier may have trouble fitting a courtship into her rejuvenated career. "Morgan Freeman wants me to play his wife in a movie about the black frontier sheriff Bass Reeves. Jim Brown and I play husband and wife in Mars Attacks! and Ernie Hudson has this script in which he and I would play parents who adopt an Asian child."

Grier says she's keeping all her options open. "I passed on the Tina Turner role in What's Love Got to Do With It?

"I told Laurence Fishburn he'd thank me for the rest of his career for passing on the movie. It saved him from having to toss my big butt around for months. I'm almost as big as he is."

For someone who personified sexuality for almost a decade, Grier insists she "was never allowed to think I was attractive. Such vanity was not allowed, let alone encouraged, in our family."

Grier says she is currently working on her autobiography but quickly warns, "That doesn't mean I'm finished, by any means.

"Some day I want to play a grandmother. And a foxy one at that!


More Artists