Gwendolyn Grier is a nurse and also the mother of Pam Grier. Gwendolyn Grier’s daughter is an American actress and singer. Described by Quentin Tarantino as cinema’s first female action star, she achieved fame for her starring roles in a string of 1970s action, blaxploitation, and women in prison films for American International Pictures and New World Pictures.
Gwendolyn Grier: Bio Summary
Aside from being a nurse, Gwendolyn Grier gained most of her popularity from being the mother of Pam Grier. Before she became a nurse, Gwendolyn was also a homemaker. She took care of Pam and her younger brother and sister, Rod and Gina while she put herself through nursing school. After school, she worked as an operating room nurse Pam told WSJ.
Gwendolyn was married to Clarence Ransom Grier, Jr. Clarence worked as a mechanic and technical sergeant in the United States Air Force. The couple raised their children Catholics but Pam was later baptized as a Methodist. Because of her husband’s military career, the family moved frequently during Pam and her sibling’s childhood. In 1956, they relocated to Swindon in South West England, United Kingdom, where her husband worked on an airforce base.
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By her daughter’s account, their family was one of the only black families in town, though she recalled that they faced no racism or segregation compared to that in the United States: “They didn’t care that I was black since they hadn’t been raised to hate blacks. Instead, they’d been raised to hate Germans… In the U.S., especially in the South, we were never able to get buses to stop for us, we couldn’t eat in certain restaurants, couldn’t use certain bathrooms. Up until 1969, there were department stores in which my father and I weren’t even allowed to try on clothing.”
Gwendolyn Grier and her family returned to the United States in 1958, when her husband was transferred to California’s Travis Air Force Base, eventually settling in Denver, Colorado, near Lowry Air Force Base. Grier recalls spending part of her upbringing on her maternal grandparents’ sugar beet farm in rural Wyoming.
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Pam Grier told WSJ– When I was 12, we moved back to Denver. My mother found a lovely three-level brick house for us. By then, my mother’s parents had moved to Denver, but they still kept their old sugar-beet farm in Wyoming, a couple of hours over the border. I loved that place.
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That was where their ancestors had homesteaded after fleeing west via the Underground Railroad to escape slavery. Grier attended East High School in Denver and appeared in a number of stage productions, as well as participating in beauty contests to raise money for college tuition at Metropolitan State College.
Where is Gwendolyn Grier now?
In 1962, Gwendolyn Grier’s husband retired from the Air Force. But without his uniform, he became a “lost soul” and the couple divorced. Pam Grier has not shared much about her mother in recent years. It is unclear if Gwendolyn Grier is still alive or resting with her ancestors as of 2023.
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