In Memoriam: Leslie Nielsen (original) (raw)

Considering how significant the Naked Gun films were to my formative years, I thought I should say something about their star Leslie Nielsen, who died on Sunday at the age of eighty-four. Although now largely known (including by me) as a comic actor, he had actually had a fairly long career as a television and movie actor before his first comedic role in Airplane!, released in 1980. Following this came the funny but unsuccessful TV series Police Squad!, and then the much more successful Naked Gun films based on the show. Nielsen made these roles work with his deadpan delivery, managing to deliver utterly absurd lines with a totally straight face. I can’t say I really saw much of him after the forgettable Spy Hard, one of a series of parody films that seemed to be of the variety where they’re apparently supposed to be funny just because they’re parodies. I just found out that the screenwriters for Spy Hard also worked on a lot of the recent spoof movies of that sort, including some of the “[Insert Genre Here] Movie” series. After all these years, they apparently still haven’t learned that referencing something else isn’t automatically funny. I also don’t recall hearing anything good about Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which I never saw despite growing up on both Nielsen and Mel Brooks. I’m not sure any of these failures were necessarily Nielsen’s own fault, though. He seems to have been the type who just wanted to keep acting as long as humanly possible, and if the roles he could get weren’t that great, they were still SOMETHING. He continued acting into his eighties, a quite impressive feat.