Leslie Nielsen

The Rigid-Jawed Leading Man

Leslie Nielsen arrived in Hollywood with the face of someone who has never broken a plate in his life. He was the son of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and a man who took drama with an almost religious seriousness. For nearly thirty years, no one laughed with him on a movie screen.

Nielsen amassed more than fifty films and hundreds of television episodes before discovering that his face was a goldmine for comedy. In Forbidden Planet, released in 1956, he played Commander Adams with absolute solemnity. He was the prototype of the square-jawed hero that the industry mass-produced in those years.

And it worked.

His screen presence carried a natural authority that casting directors loved. But that same stiffness typecast him in roles as a doctor, lawyer or soldier for decades. Producers saw him as a reliable, predictable actor who would never cause trouble on set.

The Zucker Brothers' Hit Parade

Everything changed when Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers decided that for a parody to work, the actors had to perform as if they were in a Greek tragedy. In 1980, they offered him the role of Dr. Rumack in Airplane!, and Nielsen accepted because the script struck him as wonderfully silly.

The key to his success was his ability to deliver the most absurd lines in the world without moving a single facial muscle. He earned just 100,000 dollars for that job, which definitively shattered his image as a mature leading man. Because audiences didn't expect that a man with gray hair and a baritone voice would be the epicenter of chaos.

That was the end of the serious Nielsen.

From that moment on, his career focused on exploiting the contrast between his distinguished appearance and utter clumsiness. In 1988, he starred in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, where Lieutenant Frank Drebin became his signature role. The film grossed nearly 80 million dollars in the United States on a very tight budget.

The Momentum of the Joke

During the 1990s, the actor devoted himself to repeating the formula in parodies of all kinds. Not all of them were of the same quality. Titles such as Spy Hard or 2001: Dial Zero for Murder showed that audiences were beginning to tire of scripts that relied on a constant stream of visual gags.

Still, Nielsen kept working with iron discipline. In 2003, he joined the Scary Movie franchise in its third installment and returned for the fourth film, shot in 2006. His pay for these brief appearances far exceeded what he earned during his years as the lead in war dramas.

His final projects included voicing animated characters and taking part in low-budget international productions. In 2009, he appeared in the Spanish film Spanish Movie under the direction of Javier Ruiz Caldera. It was one of his last appearances before pneumonia complicated his health at a hospital in Florida.

Leslie Nielsen died on November 28, 2010, at the age of 84 years old. He requested that the phrase Let 'er rip be engraved on his tombstone as a final nod to his love of gross-out jokes.