When we here at Eye For Film chose our top ten funniest comedies ever, in there at number two was disaster spoof Airplane! Had there been a vote for funniest performer, its star, Leslie Nielsen, would have been hard to beat. His deadpan delivery created comedy moments fans could enjoy again and again. It led to the development of a brilliant career at a point when most actors would have been thinking about retirement. Now Nielsen has died at the age of 84, it's time to look back at his extraordinary body of work. With over 200 films to get through, it looks like we picked a bad day to give up coffee.
Born in Saskatchewan in 1926, Nielsen was inspired to become an actor by his uncle, Jean Hersholt, a film, radio and theatre performer. His interest in comedy developed early on - like many budding talents, he noted that "one thing a person won't do when he's laughing is try to beat you up," and telling jokes became a way of coping with bullying at school and domestic violence at home - but he was painfully shy, so radio seemed a more natural medium to him that film. Studying in Toronto and then in New York, he lived in constant fear that somebody would notice he had no talent, but instead he found himself appearing on television with Charlton Heston and gradually getting drawn into a small screen career.
Nielsen's early roles were dramatic rather than comic, and he hoped to make his mark as a serious actor. "I remember as a young man seeing Death Of A Salesman, with Lee J. Cobb. When the play was over, nobody in the audience moved. All you could hear was a little sniffling. The silence was just overwhelming. It was a remarkable demonstration of the power of the theatre. I'll never forget that. Never," he recalled. His youthful good looks meant he was a natural choice for leading roles, but its downside was that he had few opportunities to stretch himself. His first film role was in a flop, The Vagabond King, but it helped him to get the attention of Nicholas Nayfack, who was casting for Forbidden Planet, and that changed everything.
A success in is time and a film that still enjoys cult status today, Forbidden Planet was a reworking of Shakespeare's The Tempest, science fiction style. ("I've been called the Laurence Olivier of spoofs. I guess that would make Laurence Olivier the Leslie Nielsen of Shakespeare," Nielsen would say later.) Cast as the captain of a spaceship temporarily adrift on a mysterious world, Nielsen starred alongside Anne Francis, Walter Pidgeon and one of the big screen's best loved robots. It was another clean cut hero role, but it gave him room to make his mark, and to reveal the first hints of that talent for deadpan delivery as Francis worked in a similar style. It led to a series of science fiction successes, including Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, and to a solid career as a big screen hero.
Throughout this time, Nielsen continued to work on the small screen as well, starring in all the classic series of his age, such as Rawhide, Wagon Train, The Fugitive, Peyton Place and Bonanza. Then, in 1972, he took on the superficially unremarkable role of the captain of a doomed ship in The Poseidon Adventure. What nobody knew at the time was that this film was set to be huge and to launch the disaster movie genre. Several sinkings, flood, earthquakes and plane crashes later, Nielsen was invited to parody that performance in Airplane!, after which everything changed.
"I've always been a closet comedian," Nielsen would later say. He was also a regular star of cop shows, from Hawaii Five-O to The Streets Of San Francisco and Columbo. Airplane! creators Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers enabled him to combine these talents in what would become one of television's best loved cult comedies, Police Squad! As Lt. Frank Drebin (several of his earlier cop hero characters were called Frank), Nielsen went all out to solve crimes and protect the public. He was a man who would stop at nothing and let nothing stand in his way (though he usually got results despite nothing). Such was his popularity that he went on to appear in the Naked Gun films, becoming a box office sensation. Still, it was the little things that Nielsen found most rewarding. " I was playing in a celebrity golf tournament with presidents," he recalled. "Clinton was there, Ford and Carter. We're going around as foursomes. There was a stall. I come up with the cart, and this guy walks over, stops directly in front of me, stands at attention, and says 'Ten-hut!' And then he salutes me."
Nielsen's performances as Drebin helped him secure further comedy roles, including the lead in Mel Brooks' Dracula: Dead And Loving It and the US President in the Scary Movie series. He worked right up until his death last Sunday from pneumonia, passing away peacefully in his sleep in hospital (a big building with patients, but that's not important right now). How would he like to be remembered? "It really doesn't make any difference," he said. "I've built my own little pyramid and it's gonna be around for as long as people have eyes to see."
Nielsen is survived by his fourth wife, Barbaree Earl, and his daughters, Maura and Thea. As he realised his health was declining, he commented that he felt an increasing awareness of how many important things there were to do, yet he packed far more into each year of his life than most people do in a whole lifetime. "Doing nothing is very hard to do," he explained. "You never know when you're finished."
