Actress Pam Grier has shot down rumors that she’s battling stage four cancer. A rep for the 70-year-old screen legend told TMZ that she’s “as healthy as ever,” and is slated to return to the set of Bless This Mess for its third season. The comment came in response so some (unfounded) speculation on social media that suggested otherwise.
Back in 1988, Grier had been diagnosed with stage four cervical cancer. Though she was only given 18 months to live at the time, she managed to pull through, and her cancer’s been in remission ever since.
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Grier made her first big splash in showbiz in the early 1970s starring in schlock films like The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. Throughout the rest of the decade, she became a staple of blaxploitation cinema, a movement that featured an anti-establishment with mostly black casts that were aimed at black audiences.
While she maintained regular work in front of the camera in film and TV in the years that followed, it was her role as the title character in Quentin Tarantino‘s blaxploitation homage Jackie Brown that gave her something of a career resurgence.
In recent years, she’s appeared in a few noteworthy films, including Bad Grandmas and Poms, and has thrived on the small screen. She was a series regular on Showtime’s acclaimed drama The L Word and has shown up in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Smallville and the tearjerking drama, This Is Us.
Grier’s current project, Bless This Mess, premiered in April on ABC, stars Dax Shephard and Lake Bell as a couple who leave behind the headache of living in New York City and settle on a farm in Nebraska. Kind of like a modern-day take on Green Acres. Grier stars as Constance, the local sheriff who also owns her own store, Connie’s.
Reactions to the show’s pilot episode were decidedly mixed, thanks in part to one very questionable joke. However, viewers appeared to go all-in on the sitcom after its second episode.
The second season premiered in September, just a few months after its pilot episode. The most recent finale aired on Dec. 10. As of now, there’s been no official date announced for season three.
