HOLLYWOOD -- Forget love, what's height got to do with it?

Back in 1992, when Disney announced plans to make a film about Tina Turner's tortured rise to fame, the pop diva suggested her friend Pam Grier play the role.

"Bless her soul but Tina is barely over five feet tall. In heels I'm six foot but because she suggested me the producers called me in for an audition anyway," explains Grier.

"I knew it was hopeless because they'd already hired Laurence Fishburne to play Ike Turner. A lot of actors say they're six foot when they're actually 5 ft. 9 inches.

"I told them poor Laurence would put his back out trying to throw my big butt around the room and they had to agree."

The role went to Angela Bassett helping to fast track her career. In the sci-fi thriller John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, Grier has what amounts to a brief cameo. Her character is killed off early in the film.

"I don't turn down any offers if they're respectable. I want to work. It's silly to hold out for some possible big role when you can do three actual smaller ones."

Grier did originally turn down her role in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! but for personal reasons.

"When Tim called, my dog was dying of cancer. He was like a child to me so I told Tim I refused to leave him .... Tim postponed my scenes until my dog had passed away." Grier says in one of the original endings of Mars Attacks! her character "saved Jack Nicholson's president by driving my big bus through the gates of the White House. That ending's on some cutting room floor somewhere."

Grier stars next opposite Snoop Dogg in the October horror flick Bones.


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