The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday 18 December 2010
This obituary said that episodes of "the short-lived but funny TV series Police Squad! (1982) ... always ended with [Leslie] Nielsen caught in a freeze frame while everyone else moved". No, a reader noted: "Everyone 'froze'; the joke was that some did it better than others. Occasionally a minor character would deliberately walk past etc."
Few people watching the career of the tall, husky and fair-haired Leslie Nielsen, who has died aged 84, could have predicted that the stolid actor who specialised in authority figures would become known as a comedy star after two and a half decades in show business. His reputation was transformed by playing Dr Rumack on board the threatened airliner in Airplane! (1980) and Frank Drebin, the hilariously inept plain-clothes cop, in three Naked Gun films.
What the writer-directors Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker saw in Nielsen, silvery grey and in his mid-50s, was his previously po-faced persona. "They spotted me for being what I really was, a closet comedian," he said. "And how lucky can you get? It's like they said to me, 'Leslie, come out and play.' Thank God for them."
In fact, Nielsen's acting style altered not one iota from when he played a man in jeopardy in a couple of disaster films, the ship's captain in The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and the mayor in City On Fire (1979), which led to Airplane!, a take-off of the very films in which he had been appearing. The success of Nielsen's latter performances derived from his playing it straight, as if he believed in the crazy goings-on around him. "Surely, you can't be serious," a pilot says to him in Airplane! "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley!" he replies.
Nielsen, of Danish ancestry, was born in Regina, in Saskatchewan, Canada, to a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a Welsh mother. His uncle was the celebrated actor Jean Hersholt. His brother, Erik, became deputy prime minister of Canada. After finishing high school in Edmonton, Alberta, Leslie joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, training as an aerial gunner in the second world war. Nielsen, who was legally deaf and wore a hearing aid for much of his life, began working as an announcer and a disc jockey at a Calgary radio station. He soon moved to New York to seek employment and to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
More than 20 years before he first played Drebin, Nielsen was third-billed as a serious policeman in his big screen debut, Ransom! (1956), helping Glenn Ford and Donna Reed recover their kidnapped child. In the same year, for the same studio (MGM), Nielsen played an astronaut whose spaceship invades the realm of Walter Pidgeon and his daughter, Anne Francis, in Forbidden Planet, an entertaining science-fiction version of The Tempest. He was also one of the intrusive men introduced into The Opposite Sex (1956), a feeble musical remake of George Cukor's all-female classic The Women (1939).
Nielsen exuded a certain weary charm playing a wealthy pilot who crashes in Mississippi and is nursed back to health by backwoods girl Debbie Reynolds in Tammy and the Bachelor (1957). But despite the huge box-office takings of this whimsical picture, Nielsen plodded on in bread-and-butter roles for a number of years. These included a cattle-baron villain opposing Ford in the title role of The Sheepman (1958); an ineffectual lieutenant in the third (and worst) version of Beau Geste (1966); and, briefly, as Colonel Custer in The Plainsman (1966), another inferior remake.
Nielsen was also in a number of dire comedies, playing straight man to Don Knotts in The Reluctant Astronaut (1967) and to Bob Hope in How to Commit Marriage (1969), continuing to make little impression throughout most of the 1970s, during which time he did not seem to have a humorous bone in his body. He was kept busy on television as policemen in The New Breed (1961-62) and The Bold Ones: The Protectors (1969-70), among scores of other series. Then came Airplane!, after which it was impossible ever to take him seriously again, even in horror movies such as Prom Night (1980), a Halloween ripoff with Jamie Lee Curtis, and George A Romero's Creepshow (1982).
Drebin first appeared in the short-lived but funny TV series Police Squad! (1982), Abrahams and the Zuckers' clever parody of TV cop series from Dragnet onwards. The episodes always ended with Nielsen caught in a freeze frame while everyone else moved. The series used many of the gags that were repeated and expanded in The Naked Gun (1988) and its sequels, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994).
Nielsen's deadpan acting as the incompetent cop character, completely unaware of the chaos he causes, rescued the films from crassness. Drebin is frequently caught in misunderstandings of language. ("Can I interest you in a nightcap?" "No thanks, I don't wear them"; "Cigarette?" "Yes, I know.")
Unfortunately, Nielsen's comic persona did not stretch very far beyond Drebin, although he was better than his material in Repossessed (1990), a parody of The Exorcist; as the suave count in Mel Brooks's Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995); and as agent WD-40 in Spy Hard (1996). However, he hardly raised a smile in the misconceived Mr Magoo (1997) or the horror spoofs Scary Movie 3 (2003) and Scary Movie 4 (2006), although Nielsen's appearances as an even dimmer version of President George W Bush, at one stage appearing in the nude, slightly redeemed them. In contrast, he successfully toured the US in a one-man show as the great American lawyer Clarence Darrow, proving that, surely, Nielsen could be taken seriously.
He is survived by his fourth wife, Barbaree, and two daughters, Maura and Thea, from his second marriage.
