HERE’S a challenge: think of a famous actress who’s called Swindon home.

If that seems a little too easy, here’s another challenge: think of a famous actress who’s called Swindon home, but who isn’t Billie Piper or Diana Dors.

Oh, and she has to be a bona fide Hollywood star.

The answer to the conundrum is Pam Grier, best known for her 1997 starring role in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and with countless other credits as diverse as Miami Vice and Fort Apache, The Bronx.

She first rose to prominence in the 1970s in films such as Foxy Brown and Coffy, examples of the ‘blaxploitation’ genre made by and about African Americans, but which soon came to be universally popular.

What few people know about Pam Grier is that she spent a couple of very happy years in Swindon as a little girl during the 1950s.

Those experiences have their own chapter in her autobiography, the New York Times bestseller Foxy – My Life In Three Acts, which won an African American Literary Award.

Pam arrived here aged six in 1956 with her mother, father and brother. Her father, Clarence, had been transferred as part of his service with the US Air Force. The autobiography refers to ‘Swindon Air Base’ – possibly RAF Fairford.

We won’t reveal the house number in Clifton Street here, although Pam recorded it in the book, where she describes the terraced property as a “two-storey brownstone”.

She writes: “Mom had done her research, and dad had rented the upper rooms of a duplex from our new landlady, Carrie Lofton, a sweet British woman who lived on the floor beneath us, and her husband.”

The family had experieced racial segregation in America, but things were different in their new home and their new town.

Pam writes: “We saw right away that Mrs Lofton embraced all of us, and I will never forget her gentle nature and her consistent generosity.”

The actress recalls the scent of fruit trees in the garden mingling with that of the coal used to heat the water, of feeding shillings (equivalent to five pence pieces) into the gas and electricity meters, and of buying fruit from a mobile vendor’s horse-drawn cart.

She also recalls the British climate: “We had no refrigerators, but the air was so cold that we kept our fruit and dairy products on the window ledge, where they stayed fresh until we ate them.”

Pam remembers an idyll far removed from what we tend to think of as ordinary life in the austere Britain of the 1950s. She writes of a vibrant multi-ethic neighbourhood where people shared eveything from recipes to childminding, of her mother joining Mrs Lofton and her friends to cook meals and dance to American music, and of her lessons at school opening new realms of fascination.

On a sad note, she recalls befriending a little girl from Norway called Heidi who was bullied by the other children because they thought she was German.

“Sometimes I even fought for her,” Pam writes. “How could I not when I’d been in her position so many times?”

She adds: “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.”

This seems to have been the only negative aspect of her time here. The family moved back to America after two years.

Pam writes toward the end of the chapter devoted to Swindon: “With so much new-found acceptance and freedom in our lives, it felt like the bar had been raised and we could create a wonderful life for ourselves with brand-new opportunities and loads of encouragement.”

Foxy – My Life In Three Acts, is available from bookshops, online and from Swindon libraries.