Leslie Nielsen Died

Leslie Nielsen Died:Leslie Nielsen, a serious actor who became a comic star with his career-changing role in “Airplane!” and “Naked Gun” comedies, died Sunday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 84.

Nilsson died of complications from pneumonia at a hospital near his home, surrounded by his wife, Barbara, and his friends, his agent, John C. Kelly, said in a statement.

In “Airplane!” In 1980 to send almost every disaster movie plot you can imagine, as Dr. Rumack Nielsen was “essentially a serious actor with a much ridiculous stuff is very straight,” writes the Times arts editor Charles Champlin in his review.

Just how ridiculous it was?

As passengers and crew became ill, Nielsen said that they needed to get patients to hospital.

“Hospital?” What is it? ” The stewardess asked.

Nielsen: “This is a big building with patients, but it’s not important now.”

And when Nielsen said: “Surely you can not be serious”, he replied: “I am serious and do not call me Shirley.”

Nielsen follow up to “Airplane!” On the other goofy role delivered with deadpan conviction, as Frank Drebin in “Police Squad!” TV shows and “Naked Gun” movies.

It was quite a career shift for the actor, who seemed perfectly cast as the handsome leading man when he arrived in Hollywood in 1950, already a veteran of live television appearances.

Usually, severe early role as commander of the spaceship in “Forbidden Planet” in 1956 sci-fi classics. “This is why I never asked to do” Star Trek “or” Twilight Zone “TV,” he told Toronto Star in 2002. “I was carrying too much baggage with me from this movie.”

Nielsen plays the sweetheart Debbie Reynolds’ 1957 film “Tammy and the Bachelor”, was a revolutionary war fighter Francis Marion in the Disney adventure series “Swamp Fox” and had roles in such television series as “New Generation” and “Bracken World.”

“I just always worked,” he said. “I played a lot of leaders, the autocratic nature. Maybe it was my Canadian accent.”

Nielsen also was captain of the doomed ocean liner in 1972 Disaster Movie “Poseidon Adventure”.

All this time he was closet comedian, “he told The Times in 1991.

Then the “Airplane!” changed his career.

Producers-directors-writers Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker hired Nielsen and other veteran actors Robert Stack, Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges, all perfectly cast to deceive their heroic and serious image.

“I will be eternally grateful to them,” Nielsen told The Times in 1991. “It’s just amazing roll of the dice. I’m so lucky that a representative of their humor.”

Nielsen was then thrown into the “Police Squad!”, Which aims to make the COP shows that “Airplane!” made to a disaster movie.

It lasted all of six episodes on ABC, but Nielsen moved to Drebin as the 1988 movie “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad,” with George Kennedy, OJ Simpson, Priscilla Presley among his colleagues in the film. Its success led to two sequels.

“Leslie idea to play it, maybe not directly, but it is extremely serious,” said David Zucker LA Daily News in 1994. “You can take any capacity and simply transfer it from comedy to drama There’s simply no difference -.. This is what he can do”

Nielsen was born February 11, 1926, in Regina, Saskatchewan. His father was a Royal Canadian Mounted Police and one of his brothers became the deputy prime minister of Canada.

He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force after graduating from high school and after the service was in high school Toronto radio controlled Lorne Greene – who would become a TV star from the series “Bonanza” – before moving to New York to begin work on television.

Nielsen later films included “All I Want for Christmas” in 1991, “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” in 1995, “Spy Hard” in 1996 and “Mr. Magoo” in 1997.