Leslie Nielsen, R. I. P.

The actor Leslie Nielsen, who appeared in over "100 films and 1,500 television programs over the span of his career, portraying over 220 characters died," yesterday, Sunday, from complications from pneumonia, in a hospital Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 84.

He is best known as a deadpan comic actor, the star of the very funny 1980 movie "Airplane!" and of the equally funny "Naked Gun" series of movies.

For thirty years he played the straight dramatic lead. I remember first seeing him as the Swap Fox in a TV series from Disney, and later on TV, in the sci-fi Forbidden Planet. Then he made Airplane, with its "anything-goes style to film comedy that's still the model for spoofs. Much of the credit for that lies with (him). (He) became its seriously silly face." And he became "one of the goofiest performers of his generation." He transformed from drama to comedy, from being a "B' actor to an "A" starring performer, in spoofs like the Naked Gun series, and in Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Spy Hard.

For many decades of entertainment, Leslie Nielsen, R. I. P.