Leslie Nielsen (1926-2010)

The first comedy movie I ever remember watching was Airplane!. I was eight and my old man sat me down and said, "We're going to watch this movie; it's funny." I didn't know how true of a statement that was then- I mean, I was young and what eight year-old kid is going to understand the humor in Airplane!, you know? I watched it again a decade later and it's now one of my favorite movies.

Leslie Nielsen was a great actor, with a resume spanning more than 60 years- his career will even go beyond his death; he has a project coming out in 2011 in which he voices a character for an animated flick. He was the star of some of my favorite comedy films, from the Naked Gun series to Dracula: Dead and Loving It, from 2001: A Space Travesty to one of my all-time favorites, Spy Hard. He was great in Creepshow, a movie with a series of different shorts based on Stephen King stories. One of the first pair of boobs I ever remember seeing in a movie was in Repossessed, and it truly makes me sad that we'll never have another film like Wrongfully Accused...

He was also a television actor known for roles on The Golden Girls, Who's the Boss?, Fantasy Island, Columbo, Kung Fu, Hawaii Five-O and Murder, She Wrote. The interesting thing about Nielsen's career was that it never seemed to taper off. Right up until his death he was still doing what he loved (although certainly not the most mainstream movies... Scary Movie 3... yuck).

One of the tings about Nielsen that I always found a bit bizarre was the he was originally a dramatic actor, which you can see in his first films like The Vagabond King and Forbidden Planet, as well as his early television career- the man's first TV appearance was with Charlton Heston on the program Studio One. I always knew the man as a comedy actor, so it's pretty impressive (in my opinion, at least) that he started off in drama. 

I think I loved and respected Nielsen so much because I saw so many of his films growing up... a lot of the movies I mentioned above came out during my childhood/young adult stage in life, so I associate those movies with my youth. He's a major reason I and so many other people love comedy films and saying he will be missed is an understatement.

I don't get sad at many celebrity deaths, but this one is rough... Nielsen's November 28, 2010 death was caused by complications from pneumonia- he was 84.