Early life Greer was born on the
West Side of Chicago, the eldest of seven children born to Ben, a factory worker, and Willie Mae, a home maker. and at the
Actors Studio in New York with
Elia Kazan. Living in Manhattan's
West Village (part of
Greenwich Village) in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Greer had many gay male friends who became
seriously ill.
Since 1986 Greer visited Scotland as part of a production at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1986 She has worked mainly in theatre with women and ethnic minorities, Greer has played
Joan of Arc at the Theatre Atelier in Paris. She has written radio plays for
BBC Radio 3 and
Radio 4, including a translation of
The Little Prince. Her plays include
Munda Negra (1993), concerning the mental health problems of black women,
Dancing on Blackwater (1994) and
Jitterbug (2001), and the musicals
Solid and
Marilyn and Ella. The latter work began as a radio play broadcast in December 2005 (
Marilyn and Ella Backstage at the Mocambo) after Greer watched a documentary on
Marilyn Monroe which mentioned Monroe's assistance to the jazz vocalist
Ella Fitzgerald as
segregation prevented the singer from working at certain venues, especially the
Mocambo nightclub. Adapted for the stage, Greer's radio play was given a production at the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006 and was later rewritten and performed at the
Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2008. The play was produced at the
Apollo Theatre, in London's West End, in November 2009. She is the author of two novels,
Hanging by Her Teeth (1994) and
Entropy (2009), and is working on a play for the
National Theatre Studio. Greer was a regular contributor to
BBC Two's
Newsnight Review, and has been a panelist on the BBC's
Question Time programme. She appeared on the
edition in October 2009 that also featured
Nick Griffin, then leader of the
British National Party. Commenting after the recording she called it "probably the weirdest and most creepy experience of my life". The encounter formed the basis for her opera,
Yes, written for the
Royal Opera House with music by
Errollyn Wallen, and which premiered there at the
Linbury Studio Theatre in November 2011. She was formerly director of the
Talawa Theatre Company and has served on the boards of the
Royal Opera House and the
London Film School. She is also a former theatre critic for
Time Out magazine. Greer's book
Obama Music, partly a musical memoir, was published by
Legend Press in October 2009. Reviewing it in
The Independent, Lesley McDowell said: "Greer expertly weaves in memories of her own upbringing in Chicago, with more humour than you might expect, along with a clear, defined passion for the music she grew up listening to. She wants to show, too, how both the place she lived in, and the songs she listened to, were full of unseen boundaries that had held people back – but also gave them something to fight against." Her biography of
Langston Hughes,
Langston Hughes: The Value of Contradiction, was published in 2011 (Arcadia/BlackAmber Inspirations). Greer co-produced a documentary film,
Reflecting Skin (directed by
Mike Dibb) – on representations of black people in Western art – which was shown by the BBC in 2004. She is currently working on a novel about
Rossetti. Greer's memoir
A Parallel Life was published in 2014 and was described by Joy Lodico in
The Independent as "the story of a journey deliberately and bravely taken against all expectations". Greer is a member of
the Arts Emergency Service, a British charity working with 16- to 19-year-olds in
further education from diverse backgrounds. She is a patron of the
SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK. She is also a board member of the
Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). In April 2005, she was appointed to the
British Museum's Board of Trustees and completed two full terms; from late March 2009, she served as Deputy Chairman. In 2011, she accepted the post of President of the
Brontë Society. She resigned in June 2015, following internal disagreements about the society's direction. Greer is a contributor to the 2019 anthology
New Daughters of Africa, edited by
Margaret Busby. Greer also appears in the
Sky Arts TV programme
Discovering Film, as one of its leading movie experts celebrating the lives and work of some of the most prolific and iconic Hollywood stars, and comments frequently about members of the British Royal Family on various
ITN documentaries such as
Channel 4's
Charles: Our New King. In 2023, she appeared on TalkTV and demanded that
Manchester United and
Manchester City football clubs remove images of ships from their logos claiming that they are racist and glorify slavery. When countered with the fact that both football clubs adopted their logos decades after slavery was abolished in the U.K, she claimed that history is changing and that they should investigate with historians. ==Honours and awards==