O.J. Simpson’s promising Hollywood career before sensational double murder trial

nypost.com:

who died Wednesday at 76, had a varied career in Hollywood as an actor and a pitchman before his trial for double murder in the 1994 deaths of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.The former Buffalo Bills star with marquee good looks, nicknamed “The Juice,” was at the epicenter of pop culture for his movie, TV and commercial roles throughout the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s.

It seemed, during those days, that you couldn’t turn on your TV without seeing one of Simpson’s Hertz commercials where — as a spokesman for the rental car company — he ran and careened through airports, nor ignore his big-screen work, most notably in the “Naked Gun” movies starring Leslie Nielsen.Simpson was a big enough star, in fact, that he was pitched to the “Terminator” director James Cameron to star in the 1984 action movie — a suggestion that Cameron said later, in an interview with Chris Wallace, he immediately dismissed. “I actually think that’s a bad idea,” Cameron recalled thinking, he said on on the Max series “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” The filmmaker, of course, pivoted to Arnold Schwarzenegger for what turned out to be a big-screen blockbuster.

O.J. Simpson as a cybernetic assassin? No one would ever buy it.A decade later, Simpson became an even bigger star of daytime television — for completely nefarious reasons.Simpson obviously had his eye on a Hollywood career from the get-go; he reportedly became a professional actor — signing on for an episode of the CBS series “Medical Center” — before inking his NFL contract with the Buffalo Bills.

He got his feet wet early while still a Heisman Trophy-winning undergraduate at USC, making a few uncredited appearances on television shows in the 1960s including “Dragnet,”.