Leslie Nielsen seemed such a natural fit for comedy that it’s hard now to remember that his casting in Airplane! was part of a plan to put serious actors in the roles because that made them funnier. To be sure, he’d done comedy before, but not a lot. I wonder if he might not have made better movies in his later years if people had gone back to letting him do drama—or if he’d chosen himself to go back to it, if the choice was his. I’m sure the comedies were more fun, but he did end up getting dragged into “referencing things is inherently funny” parodies, and he deserved better than that.
Leslie Nielsen was so Canadian that his father was a Mountie. (And related to Jean Hersholt, of Humanitarian Award fame—if I have this figured right, Hersholt and Ingvard Nielsen shared a mother and had separate fathers.) He was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, and he was raised in the Northwest Territories. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force despite being seventeen and deaf, mostly it seems to get away from his abusive father. He was trained as an aerial gunner during World War II, but the whole “seventeen” thing meant he never served overseas.
After the war, he got into acting. He seems to have had enormous concern that he’d be sent back to Canada as not talented enough, but he settled into a steady career nonetheless. Mostly, he worked in television—I’m disappointed to learn that he didn’t ever do Lux Video Theatre, but he did quite a lot of that sort of show. He did dozens of different TV shows in the ’50s, often multiple episodes of each show. It may not have paid much, something he himself complained about, but it was steady work. He was considered handsome and a solid actor, but there was a lot of that going around in those days.
If he hadn’t hooked up with Zucker-Abrams-Zucker in 1980, he would be best remembered for Forbidden Planet. It’s a strange movie—The Tempest in space by way of psychoanalysis—and there’s admittedly not a done for him to do in it. “I just had to wear a tight uniform and make eyes at Anne Francis. I was pretty thin back then,” he said. But he’s a strong presence in it, and he’s doing good work. Not enough to make him a star—he went back to TV, where he apparently considered his performance as Francis Marion in Disney’s The Swamp Fox to be some of his best work—but still.
While he became a US citizen in the ’50s, it’s still clear that he kept a soft spot in his heart for his native land. Yes, I am basing that on his four episodes of Due South and his role in Men With Brooms. I will say, though, that his role in Due South, Buck Frobisher, is beautifully written for him. Yes, I could do without all the gas references in his second episode, but his first appearance allows him to combine comedy and pathos in a way that I’m not sure anything else in his career did. He was a talented actor—and a nice enough guy to arrange to have a bench built by his grave because there’s not a lot of seating in the cemetery he’s buried in.
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