“Have no fear; Pam Grier is here…a chick with drive, who don’t take no jive.”

The trailer for Coffy (1973)

She began as a junkie willing to do anything to get straight – so we think – ready to give herself to a two-bit dealer in return for the needle. She’s wears a short dress, styles her hair in an impressive afro and has a body that curves in all the right places.

“Hey, big man,” she purrs crawling into his bed. “Why don’t you turn off the lights?”

He gets out of bed, plunges the room into darkness and turns to see the girl – Coffy – pointing a sawn-off shotgun at his head. Her brown eyes twinkle in the moonlight.

“This is the end of your rotten life you mother fucking dope pusher,” she says before blasting a hole in the gangster’s head.

Pam Grier had arrived.

1973s Coffy didn’t just make Grier a star; it turned her into an instant icon. Black women suddenly had an independent role model who they could look up to, and men everywhere fell in love with a lady they wanted, but weren’t sure they could handle.

The film came right in the middle of the blaxploitation movement in American cinema, a time when studios realised the financial potential of making pictures:

“with Blacks, by Blacks and for Blacks,” as critic James Monaco put it.

These movies – movies like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and Shaft (1971) – universally fell into the crime genre, and dealt with cops, crooks and guns. They were street-smart and told from a working class perspective.

Coffy was written and directed by Jack Hill and became one of the first of this subgenre to portray a female protagonist. Hill’s film showed that girls could get the job done just as well as the boys, sometimes better.

Grier’s Coffy has taken to the streets in search of vengeance for the 11 year old sister who pushers turned into a junkie. As a result she is full of righteous anger and follows a trail of criminals that leads into the Mafia and American politics.

The streets aren’t safe for decent people, the cops don’t care and the communities live in fear. Coffy doesn’t. She fights with broken bottles, hides razorblades in her ‘fro (Pam’s idea), gets down with some epic cat fights and kicks the ass of any scumbag who gets in her way.

But she is more than just a badass chick, and thanks to Grier’s remarkable performance (she was only 24) is shown as a real woman struggling to get by. By day she’s a nurse - a hard working woman twisted by a diseased society. Murder doesn’t come easy to her and Grier’s face hides guilty regret.

The final scene has Coffy, tears running down her face and having got the job done, throwing aside her shotgun and walking away into an unknown future. Her revenge has cleaned up the streets, but it may have cost her her soul.

Grier was born at the tail-end of the 40s, to a father in the army and a nurse mother (whom her performance in Coffy was partly based on). She was one of four children and life was hard. But this large family found strength in each other.

Her first film role came in 1971 with the women-in-prison movie The Big Doll House (for which Grier sang the title track). The film was again directed by Jack Hill and he was so impressed by Grier that he wrote the part of Coffy just for her.

“[Coffy] is a woman who knows how to handle herself in high society and also on the streets,” explained Hill. “She could discuss philosophy in one scene and hit someone with a stool in the next. That was Pam.”

Following the movie’s remarkable success, Hill went to work on a sequel, Burn, Coffy, Burn which became the basis for Foxy Brown in 1974. The film abandoned the ethical debate of vigilantism (“Vigilante justice?” asks Foxy. “It’s as American as Apple Pie”) and instead turned Grier into a full on Superwoman – a Bond girl who doesn’t need James Bond.

In an array of exotic 70s outfits and with a stub-nose gun hiding in her bra, Foxy takes on ‘the man’ after her cop boyfriend is killed by gangsters. There was a feeling of empowerment to Foxy, taking on the ‘stupid white men’ who always find themselves in control.

She uses her voluptuous body to sucker them in, and then uses her mind to finish them off. In order to get a “pink ass, corrupt honkey judge,” to throw the book at some dealers, she poses as a high-class hooker, gets him undressed and then humiliates him by tossing him out of the hotel room in just his briefs.

In a later scene, she finds herself at the mercy of two ‘good ‘ol boy’ rapists. But she will never, ever, give up and after freeing herself uses a coat hanger to scratch out the eyes of one and douses the other in gasoline – she then torches both of them.

“She ain’t gonna take no shit from a man, just because it’s a man’s world,” as rapper T.I. explained.

It is easy to see why Grier was embraced by black female audiences. She was a star in a world that is still at heart racist and sexist. In American cinema you can still count the number of black female leads on one hand and everyone from Halle Berry to Vivica A. Fox owes a debt to Pam. She empowered these women and showed they could be more than equal to their white counterparts.

In 1975 Grier took the lead in Sheba, Baby; the story of a female PI who must protect her father from the mob. Armed with a .44 Magnum, Sheba is just as tough as Coffy and Foxy – kicking ass and taking names

“I’m not going to sit on the sidelines just because I’m a woman,” she tells her father before proceeding to blast the gangsters back to hell.

But by the mid-70s the Blaxploitation genre was beginning to peter out. Liberals (who missed the point that these were crime movies) began to express outrage over a series of films that showed black people as drug dealers, pimps and crooks, so the studios decided to abandon them all together.

Grier herself was in two minds over the impact of these movies:

“The stereotypes that we have are often what we perpetrated ourselves,” she explained. “I broke some of them but I also created some.”

Nonetheless, the genre turned Grier into a pop culture icon, a position that very few actors survive. James Dean crashed and burned, Brando ballooned and Bruce Lee perished by misadventure. Rather than believe the hype, Grier took the most sensible option available to her – she went to work.

Over the next 20 years she honed her craft in film, TV and theatre and transformed herself into a skilled character actress. In 1977 she stared opposite Richard Pryor in Greased Lightning (and the two had a brief affair), she was in Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981) with Paul Newman, played a witch in Disney’s underrated adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and guest stared in TV shows from The Cosby Show to Miami Vice

In the late 80s Grier was wrongfully diagnosed with having terminal cancer, but somehow, found the resolve to carry on. Over the following years she returned to acting with a newfound determination and in 90s began to creep back towards the mainstream. She had cameos in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) and later featured in Tim Burton’s star-studded Mars Attacks! (1996)

In the same year Grier showed a willingness to send herself up and portrayed a transsexual in John Carpenter’s Escape from LA. Here she was Hershe Las Palmas (neé Carjack Malone) a former partner of Snake Plissken who doesn’t take any shit from anyone. The more things change the more they stay the same.

These films showed audiences what a versatile performer Grier had become, but it was Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) that proved she could still carry a movie. Based on Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch Tarantino (always unable to make a movie that isn’t about movies) decided to turn the picture into a full blown homage to Blaxploitation cinema.

The lead character Jackie Burke was switched from white to black and, in a nod to Foxy, her surname became Brown. Tarantino had only Grier in mind for the title role and she did not disappoint.

There are moments in Jackie Brown where Grier shows that old take-no-shit fire i.e. when she pulls a gun on gun dealer Ordell and orders him to:

“Shut your raggedy ass up and sit the fuck down.”

But she is also older and more worn. Jackie worries about her appearance (though she still looks fine) and her own future. She’s an airline stewardess, but her insecurity about money has led her to smuggle cash across the boarder for Ordell.

It is a remarkably mature performance. The film ends on a single close up of Jackie’s face, driving away having outsmarted both the cops and crooks. Her eyes go over everything she’s done and there is a bittersweet mixture of strength and sadness there. Tarantino had cast Grier the icon, but gotten an exceptional movie actress in for the bargain.

Since Jackie, Grier has gone back to acting for a living and can be seen bringing dignity to whatever film/TV show she finds herself in. She’s been a regular player in TVs acclaimed The L Word (2004-2008) and has two more films in the pipeline. She is a captivating performer and a valuable part of cinema’s history…and even today, she still don’t take no jive.

Celebrating those fine actors who have left a considerable mark on the movie industry but their appeal and often their obscurity and desire to work outside of the Hollywood trends has brought them only a cult legion of fans.

These are the actors who probably won’t have stars on the Hollywood boulevard named after them, books dedicated to their craft, multiple Oscars in their cabinet or celebrity gossip pages in Hello magazine.

Cult Actors is our way of saying thank you to those legends whose name you might not recognise but whose face is memorable. The feature is maintained by Tom Fallows whose Pocket Essential Guide to George A. Romero’s work hits stands in October.