The late-blooming success of Leslie Nielsen, the great comedian who never smiled

“Let ‘er rip” is the epitaph on the grave of Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen. Don’t look for anything poetic or profound: it refers to farts, his trademark. He was famous for carrying a small device everywhere that, when activated, mimicked the sound of flatulence. And he kept it by his side until the very end, literally. During his funeral — a cocktail and party featuring music from The Naked Gun — his wife placed it in the coffin and triggered it whenever someone came forward to pay their respects.

Reading this, anyone would think he was a born comedian, a child who grew up making family and schoolmates laugh, a natural clown — but the truth is that for most of his career, Nielsen was a dramatic, or rather, a stoic actor. A handsome yet expressionless leading man, he appeared in virtually all television productions filmed during the 1960s and 1970s, from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Columbo and The Love Boat.

The world discovered Nielsen when he was already past 50. At a time when some actors are calculating how much longer they have until retirement, he made a radical turn. It wasn’t so much a reinvention as it was the creation of a character who would define his career for three decades. If Leslie Nielsen appeared in a film, audiences already knew what to expect.

The miracle was the work of the ZAZ team — David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker — three writers and directors from Wisconsin who one day decided to make a movie about an airplane accident that would parody the disaster films that had enjoyed their glory years in the 1970s. To cast Airplane!, they didn’t look for comedic actors. They believed the essence of the project was that everyone treat it seriously, no matter how absurd the situations, and for that reason they insisted on casting character actors like Robert Stack, Peter Graves, and Lloyd Bridges instead of Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, as Paramount had suggested. When it came to playing the unflappable Dr. Rumack, the comedian Dom DeLuise was proposed — but they had only one name in mind: Leslie Nielsen.

“At the time, I think people recognized his face for having been in hundreds of television and movie roles but didn’t necessarily know his name,” Jerry Zucker recalled in the oral history of Airplane!.

“At that time, people recognized his face because he had participated in hundreds of films and television series, but they didn’t necessarily know his name,” Jerry Zucker acknowledged in an article on Airplane! In AV Club.

“Everyone was terrific, really, but Leslie was the one who was just a fish in water. Leslie just loved it, every minute of it, and practically didn’t need direction, because once he got what we were doing, that was just his thing. He loved it,” added Zucker.

Nielson had finally found his place in the world of acting. “Leslie Nielsen’s whole persona up to that moment — Airplane! Absolutely changed his career — was that he was the big, handsome, staid leading man. But he was the goofiest motherfucker you’ve ever met in your life,” said actor David Leisure, who played one of the Hare Krishnas in Airplane!.

Leisure was one of the first victims of Nielsen’s fart machine. Nielsen sat next to him, introduced himself in the deep voice that had served him for years as a voice actor, and suddenly burped. “Sorry, I had onions at lunch,” he apologized. “And then he would have this thing tucked under his arm, and you’d hear this loud, boisterous fart come out, and you’d go, ‘Oh, my God!’" Said Leisure. “And then you’d realize he was pulling a gag on you, and he’d go sit down next to some girl, some extra, and he’d do the same thing. You’d see her face just blanch, waiting for the invisible thing to hit her nostrils."

The fart machine was a constant on all his sets. The device had reportedly been made by a friend who was a doctor, and one day Nielsen showed up on set with a box full of them and sold them to the entire crew for $7. Since everyone was using them all the time, the sound department eventually had to confiscate the gadgets to prevent further ruined takes. Priscilla Presley also fell victim during the filming of Airplane!.

“I didn’t know how to react,” Presley told ET. " He saw the look on my face and started laughing. He took his hand from his pocket and pulled out this gadget that he carried with him all the time... His whoopee cushion. That prank broke the ice to a friendship I will always cherish.”

A closet comedian

Nielsen, who considered himself “a closet comedian,” knew that Dr. Rumack was the role of a lifetime. “‘I told my agent: ‘Do not negotiate. Accept! I’ll pay them to do this part!” He told The New York Times years later. The film was an unexpected success, with Nielsen’s performance among its greatest assets. For the director, it was hilarious just to watch him try: an actor with “uncanny ability to do silly slapstick in a way that’s believable.”

It’s surprising how late he came to a genre he seemed born for, but Nielsen admitted he lacked confidence. “I never had the courage,” he said on The Last Resort With Jonathan Ross. “I was afraid to put it to the test.”

Nielsen was the son of a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who, according to an unauthorized biography, beat his wife and children. He grew up in an area near the Arctic where, he admitted, his main concern was to keep “from freezing to death.” At 17, he enlisted in the Air Force, and after leaving, moved to New York to study acting. He was not the only actor in his family: his uncle was Jean Hersholt, a name familiar to Oscar enthusiasts, as a humanitarian award is given in his honor each year (the most recent recipient was singer and actress Dolly Parton).

He enrolled in the Actors’ Studio, just like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, and thanks to his good looks and deep voice, he quickly found his place on screen. His first cinematic success came with the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet (1956). He also appeared in another classic, The Poseidon Adventure (1972), playing a type of character he would later parody. He nearly played Mesala in Ben-Hur (1959), but the role went to Stephen Boyd. The actor worked harder than anyone, yet never stood out; as one critic noted, “he was merely a handsome leading man in an industry overstocked with handsome leading men.”

Nielsen’s stern appearance often led him to play dangerous characters. “I was so frequently cast early on as a high-born young man with…'problems,’ and later as a heavy, from black-hatted western villains to the corporate raider to bad cops. In fact, the very last serious role I ever played was as the heavy, opposite Barbra Streisand, portraying the vicious john she killed in Nuts [1987],” he told Den of Geek.

Nielsen never regretted his shift to comedy, though he knew there was no turning back. “Now that I’ve done comedy, I’d love to go back and do heavy drama. Trouble is, I might do the most diabolical thing to a defenseless woman and the audience [would just laugh].”

He worked in film, television, and theater, always in dramatic roles — a fact that seems striking today. “We’re amazed people ever took him seriously all these years, and it’s quite disconcerting to see him in a heavy drama,” Jerry Zucker told the Chicago Tribune.

From the start, Zucker and his team recognized the great comic actor he was and cast him as the lead in their next hit: The Naked Gun (1988). Nielsen’s Frank Drebin became the epitome of the incompetent man who thinks he’s infallible.

Although the TV series it was based on, Police Squad, was a failure that lasted barely half a dozen episodes, the team later watched as the film adaptation became an instant success. Made on a budget of just $12 million, it grossed over $80 million. The triumph spawned two sequels (and a recent reboot starring Liam Neeson) and countless imitators of varying quality, all hoping to include the Canadian actor. He had become an icon of absurd humor.

Not everything worked, however. Repossessed (1990), a parody of The Exorcist filmed with a struggling Linda Blair, was a flop, as was Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).

Brooks was captivated by Nielsen after seeing him in The Naked Gun, but the parody of Transylvanian vampire films was a disaster that failed to convince critics or audiences. Nor did the lower-quality productions based solely on Nielsen’s cameos.

But Nielsen seemed delighted despite the poor results. He didn’t hesitate to make cameos in the third and fourth Scary Movie films, the other major parody franchise, as well as in Superhero Movie. Indeed, one of his last movies was another spoof, Spanish Movie, Javier Ruiz Caldera’s parody of recent Spanish cinema, where he teamed up with another comedic genius, Chiquito de la Calzada.

Although his career outside of the Zucker projects never reached the same heights, Nielsen earned a place in pop culture for another role. In 1992, he played Lucas Hollingsworth, Blanche’s elegant uncle who walked Dorothy down the aisle in the final episode of The Golden Girls.

Nielsen, who would have turned 100 in February, was a satisfied and happy man. “I’ve had a few [awards] along the way, and to be honest, I never expected any of them,” he said in 2008. “I made a good living for decades, and that was enough; that, and maybe a good residual check from time to time. And a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, maybe.”

Not much more you could ask for.

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