“Surely this isn’t a serious story?”
“It is a serious story. And don’t call me Shirley.”
Leslie Nielsen, who moved from being a serious film and television actor with credits like Forbidden Planet, The Poseidon Adventure, and TV’s “The Bold Ones,” to being a marvel of deadpan comedy in movies like Airplane!, The Naked Gun (and its TV series predecessor “Police Squad), has passed away in a Florida hospital at age 84.
“It is a serious story. And don’t call me Shirley.”
Leslie Nielsen, who moved from being a serious film and television actor with credits like Forbidden Planet, The Poseidon Adventure, and TV’s “The Bold Ones,” to being a marvel of deadpan comedy in movies like Airplane!, The Naked Gun (and its TV series predecessor “Police Squad), has passed away in a Florida hospital at age 84.
- KC's View:
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I think it is fair to say that as much as audiences enjoyed Nielsen in all those comedies, nobody had any more fun than he did, since Nielsen seemed to delight in his new-found comedy career.
There were a lot of folks who, we discovered, were capable of being funny when put in the right movie with the right lines - everyone from Peter Graves to Robert Stack, George Kennedy to Lloyd Bridges, and even Priscilla Presley and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. (O.J. Simpson even seemed funny at the time, but events have given his appearance in The Naked Gun unintended irony.) But nobody seemed to be having more fun than Nielsen.
