He is so well-known and well-loved even after all this time, that his death is making surprisingly big headlines: Leslie Nielsen, star of Naked Gun, goofy silver-haired comic actor, dead at 84 from complications from pneumonia.
Some people, of course, should never die. Not by violence, not from old age -- not at all. And as far as his public persona goes, Leslie Nielsen was one of those guys: befuddled, brilliant, clueless, sly. We're going to miss him. He was and is and will be irreplaceable.
But we remember the other Leslie Nielsen, too -- the one we grew up with. The one was was a guest star in pretty much ever single hour-long drama on American TV from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies, and not as a comedian, but as a serious, respected character actor. The Fugitive, Wagon Train, Ben Casey. And not so much later Kojak, Cannon, Columbo, Kung Fu, and even series that didn't start with the "K" sound. He was a serious guy in those days; sleek, silver-haired, hatchet-handsome, always playing non-ethnic crime-boss sharks or corrupt cops. Always slightly dangerous and hard as nails. Which is why it was so funny when, after a few years on the back burner, he showed up in Airplane! and then in Police Squad! Because not so long before then, he had actually been in the very shows that those performances parodied so perfectly. And he did it with such convincing earnestness, such ease.
He was on TV almost before there was TV. IMDB has his first performances listed as 1950. He was on Philco Theater. He was on Suspense. He was on Twilight Zone -- the original Twilight Zone, the good one. He was the captain of the spaceship in Forbidden friggin' Planet, man, and in Tammy and the Bachelor and Peyton Place and Beau Geste. And he didn't go all funny on us until thirty years and literally hundreds of performances after his first appearance. Then he kept on for another twenty years. And though some of those movies were god-awful, Leslie Nielsen never was. He never let us down.
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