Pam Grier celebrates Jackie Brown Friday night at the Alamo

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In her nearly 45-year career, Pam Grier has often seemed less like an actress and more like an alchemist, turning unpromising material into gold.

Since her breakthrough role in Jack Hill’s 1971 women-in-prison movie, The Big Doll House, Grier has taken on racial stereotypes, sexism, the drug trade, arms dealers, genocidal Martians and garish ’70s fashion — and usually emerged victorious. Four decades ago, in revenge dramas such as Coffy and Foxy Brown (which gave the rapper Inga DeCarlo Fung Marchand her stage name), she opened the door for future action stars such as Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock, and she made the cover of Ms. And she has renewed her stardom in the years since, gaining her most recent set of fans as Jennifer Beals’ supportive older sister, Kit, for six seasons of The L Word.

Yet her star power and her legacy have never been more intertwined — or more effective — than in Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 reworking of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch. Friday night, August 7, Grier appears at Kansas City Comic Con’s 35 mm screening of Jackie Brown, at the Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet (1400 Main). At 4 p.m. Saturday, she’s at Bartle Hall to talk about her career as part of Comic Con; see kansascity-comiccon.com for tickets and the rest of the lineup.

Grier spoke with The Pitch last week by phone.

The Pitch: I read your memoir, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, because I wanted to make sure I knew enough about your career.

Grier: [Laughs.] Oh, my God. I look at it and go, “I’m tired — 45 years.” But look at what Betty White has had. Florence Henderson is 81, come on!

My granddaddy Ray said that if a woman can’t do anything, a man won’t respect her. So he taught all of his granddaughters and my mom and my aunt how to hunt, fish and shoot, bring the boat and drive the tractor. That was so we could have something from a rural and urban environment as well as a military environment, so we would have a self-esteem and something of value to trade, so we’ve got some education.

We’ve been contributing to the economy since 1974, when we had the oil embargo, when 49 to 60 percent of women stayed at home and weren’t equal in the workforce. When they had to go out into the workforce, it boosted the economy greatly. For example, if you take away all the women for one week and have them not work, see what happens to the economy. It absolutely will crash. One week, not a month — one week.

You’ve said you’re a comic-book fan. What kind of comics have you enjoyed reading?

I was escaping into Superman, Supergirl. You had Wonder Woman. We had the Hulk. My favorite is Archie. That was so romantic to me. Archie and Veronica, are you kidding? I enjoyed them so much, superheroes who saved the underdog, who fought crime. I loved some of the Batman comics, even though I found some of them spooky.

In the prison movies you did and the revenge dramas you made with Jack Hill, you and Hill managed to slip in some serious takedowns of sexism, racism and illicit drugs.

That was the only way we could get it in because we’d have had opposition if anything was just forthright and honest.

Jack hadn’t gone into the black community to see a lot of the narratives, so I would bring him narratives. First of all, Coffy was my mom. Coffy was a nurse who stood up to the bad guys in the hood. And that was my mom.

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It was the Jim Crow time. Many times, the ambulances would not come to your African-American neighborhood. You’d have a car crash, and they’d tow away the car while you’re sitting on the curb. I never saw an ambulance in our neighborhood. Ever. Most of us did not. I’d come home, and my mom was fixing somebody’s head or arm. If someone didn’t take you, you were going to die or go to someone’s house. That was in the late ’60s, early ’70s. You could cram in as many messages as you wanted. There was very little fantasy in those films. It was real.

The only reason I took the [first] Jack Hill movie was because I needed tuition to go to film school. I had turned down [producer] Roger Corman. I read Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. I was so impressed with the book. It was just amazing. I was very much alone. No one really knew the level of preparation or dedication that I had. They kind of laughed at it and gawked. “Oh, women. They just have to put on a push-up bra, wear makeup and look cute.” No, that’s not what Stanislavski or Chekhov do. I followed the book in my heart. And hopefully, as they’re saying, I made the work better, even though it was a wet T-shirt–in-prison movie. I made the work interesting, as if you were in a real prison. That’s why I’m talking with you about it 45 years later.

I tried to get a Western done about Mary Fields, the first black stagecoach driver for the mail route in Montana. Gary Cooper wrote an article in Ebony. She had a wonderful and substantial contribution to the West. I pitched it to my agents, and then I pitched it to the studios. Nobody would believe there was a black stagecoach driver, even with pictures. “Blacks did not exist in the West.” So there you go. My mom’s from Wyoming.

You’re obviously proud of your ’70s work and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Why are you so eager to do a Q&A for that film?

No children are allowed because there might be some profanity. [Laughs.] Because when we talk about the authenticity of Sam Jackson’s Ordell, I have some anecdotes that are going to make people laugh so hard, they are going to cry.

Why do you like the film so much?

It’s less action, more cerebral and crafty. It’s grifting out the gangstas. Here’s this flight attendant who’s at the tail end of her career. She can’t lose any more jobs or go to jail. She’s making $16,000 a year. She really has to win this game. She has to use her wits. She has to come up with a plan and have someone trust her and help her with this plan.

What was it like working with Tarantino?

Our takes were long because we didn’t have the budget to do a lot of takes and post-production work, so we had to be relatively good. I don’t think Quentin would have hired me if I hadn’t done theater because it’s discipline. You don’t get Take 2.

With Michael Keaton … I remember thinking, “Oh, my God. He’s at Mach speed. He’s at warp 3!” I have to be so present with him and equal in mind, or you can’t do a scene with him. Sam Jackson as well. When you are so listening, which is part of your tools as an actor, you can’t be behind. You’ve got to know what you’re doing, or the scene will not work. I said, “Can I do this or am I going to walk away with my tail between my legs? I can’t embarrass Quentin. He has invested two years of his life to write this for me. I. Can’t. Fail. Him.” I had to push beyond what I ever thought was going to be given to me as an actor.

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You were one of the leads in the Showtime series The L Word for six years. What did you take from that experience?

It was important for me to understand a community that I didn’t know, that had experienced such discrimination and such issues. It really helped me to share it with people who were homophobic. I’ve had people write me letters and say because of me doing The L Word, they were able to accept people who were gay in their families. Even if it’s one person, I felt I did something.