Pamela Suzette Grier (born May 26, 1949) is an American actress. She became known in the early 1970s for starring in a string of women in prison and blaxploitation films such as The Big Bird Cage (1972), Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), and Sheba, Baby (1975). She starred in Quentin Tarantino's film Jackie Brown, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. She has also been nominated for a SAG Award, as well as a Satellite Award for her performance in Jackie Brown. Grier is also known for her work on television; for six seasons, she portrayed Kate 'Kit' Porter on the television series The L Word. She received an Emmy nomination for her work in the animated program Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child. Rotten Tomatoes has ranked her as the second-greatest female action heroine in film history. Director Tarantino remarked that she may have been cinema's first female action star.
