LITTLE ROCK — Airplane!, Naked Gun comedies’ star
Leslie Nielsen, the Canadian born actor who in middle age tossed aside three decades of credibility in dramatic and romantic roles to make a new, far more successful career as a comic actor in films like Airplane! and the Naked Gun series, died Sunday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 84.
According to The Associated Press, his agent, John S. Kelly,said Nielsen died at a hospital near his home in Fort Lauderdale where he was being treated for pneumonia.
Nielsen, a tall man with a matinee-idol profile, was often cast as an earnest hero at the beginning of his film career in the 1950s. His best known roles included the stalwart spaceship captain in the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet (1956), the wealthy, available Southern aristocrat in Tammy and the Bachelor (1957) and an ocean liner captain faced with disaster in The Poseidon Adventure (1972).
In the low-budget, big money-making 1980 disaster-movie parody Airplane!, he was cast as a clueless doctor on board a possibly doomed jetliner. Critics and audiences alike praised his deadpan comic delivery, and his career was reborn.
Airplane! was followed by a television series, Police Squad! (1982), from the film’s director-writers.
It lasted only six episodes, but Nielsen, his goofy character, Lt. Frank Drebin, and the creators went on to three successful feature-film spinoffs.
The first, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), was followed by The Naked Gun 212 / : The Smell of Fear (1991) and The Naked Gun 3313 / : The Final Insult (1994).
Other filmmakers cast Nielsen in a variety of comedies, including Repossessed (1990), an Exorcist spoof with Linda Blair; Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995); Spy Hard (1996); and 2001: A Space Travesty (2000).
None were received as well as the Naked Gun films, but Nielsen found a new continuing role as the paranoid, out-of-control president of the United States in Scary Movie 3 (2003) and Scary Movie 4 (2006).
He was nominated twice for Emmy Awards, in 1982 as outstanding lead actor in a comedy series for Police Squad! and in 1988 as outstanding guest actor in a comedy series for an episode of Day by Day, an NBC sitcom about yuppies and day care.
Off screen, he was made an officer of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor, in 2002.
Arkansas, Pages 8 on 11/29/2010