Twentieth-century fox As the glamorous, gun-slinging Foxy Brown, Pam Grier was both sex symbol and radical icon, the undisputed queen of the Seventies blaxploitation flick. Twenty-five years on, she's the eponymous star of Quentin Tarantino's new film Jackie Brown. The role guarantees overwhelming fame. But she's more than ready to handle it

When Pam Grier dropped in on Quentin Tarantino to talk over the title role of his new film, Jackie Brown, she found his office adorned with posters of her Seventies films, from her reign as Hollywood's Queen of blaxploitation. Surprised, she asked if he put them up for her benefit. `No,' he said. `I almost took them down because you were coming over.' The story is revealing, both for Grier's off-hand approach to her cult status - which is in the throes of a Nineties revival, owing to more than Tarantino's film alone - and for her power to reduce the bad boy of Hollywood primo directors to awed fan.

Tarantino wrote his screen adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 1995 novel, Rum Punch, with his teen idol Grier in mind. Shifting its Miami setting to his home turf of South Bay, Los Angeles, he switched the race of its blonde heroine, Jackie Burke, to make the film a homage to the actress he calls `the Queen of Women', and to her genre. It was renamed Jackie Brown in tribute to Grier's 1974 film Foxy Brown. `Pam is such an icon, it's like casting John Wayne in a movie,' Tarantino said. `But instead of a superbad mama with a sawn-off shotgun and razor blades in her afro, this is Foxy Brown 20 years on.'

Grier, now aged 48, rose to American pop-icon status in the early Seventies as a voluptuous and indomitable action heroine who did all her own stunts. In marked contrast to most women of the blaxploitation genre, she was neither background scenery nor fodder for pimps. Her Amazonian beauty and propensity to disrobe, alongside her not-to-be-messed-with independence and active sexuality, made her paradoxically both a sex symbol (she modelled nude for Playboy and Players magazine) and a role model of the women's movement.

It was a lucrative formula. In 1977, the Washington Post ranked Grier with Liza Minelli and Barbra Streisand as one of three `bankable' female stars in Hollywood. Yet, although briefly challenged by the 6ft 2in Tamara Dobson in another kung-fuing blaxploitation flick, Cleopatra Jones, Grier's pioneering action heroines had no obvious white equivalents (The Avengers' Emma Peel perhaps comes closest). Jackie Brown, Grier's 50th film, is her first starring role in...