One of the most famous, talented and successful running backs in US football history, Jim Brown later joined the ranks of fellow athletes Johnny Weissmuller, Esther Williams and Sonja Henie in making a successful transition to Hollywood movie stardom. Like them, he was not so much developed as an actor or marketed as a personality as he was associated with a genre and presented as a spectacle, a remarkable "body in motion". Nonetheless, Brown was a popular star from the late 1960s through the mid-70s, at first in a handful of mainstream action productions and later in blaxploitation films