Jim Brown , American football star and film and television star, has died. He was 87 years old. Brown was the star of the Cleveland Browns, the team he played for throughout his nine-year NFL career.
He is considered one of the greatest football players of all time and was also a civil rights activist during his lifetime.
Brown was still in the prime of his football career when he was cast in the western Rio Conchos , his motion picture debut released in 1964. After his retirement from the NFL, he appeared in an episode of the series The Spies , opposite Bill Cosby , and in the films The Dirty Dozen , Dark Beyond the Sun, Kenner, Zebra Arctic Base, The Big Heist 6, Tick… Tick… Tick… Violence Erupts , and El Condor , among others.
In the 80s he spent a period in television, between CHiPs, Supercar, TJ Hooker and A-Team , before returning to the cinema in The implacable , alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger . He would later appear in the Mars Attacks! (one of his most memorable roles, as retired boxing champion Byron Williams), He Got Game, Small Soldiers, Any Given Sunday, and She Hates Me . His last role came in 2014, when he played himself in Ivan Reitman ‘s Draft Day , opposite Kevin Costner .
Jim Brown was also the first African-American to play an interracial love scene in a big Hollywood movie, the one with Raquel Welch in the western El Verdugo (1969).
Brown is also one of the main characters in Regina King ‘s One Night in Miami , which takes place on February 25, 1964, when Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali , after beating Sonny Liston by snatching the heavyweight world champion title from him, spent the evening with friends Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Brown himself (played by Aldis Hodge ).
In 1967, Jim Brown organized the Cleveland Summit , at which he, along with ten other top American athletes of the time, such as basketball players Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar , endorsed Muhammad Ali’s stance against the Vietnam War and compulsory leverage.