Leslie Nielsen, Remembered

John Podhoretz examines an extraordinary career. An excerpt:

An ur-White Man, Nielsen was headed for the junk pile by 1980. The kinds of parts he was playing—mayors, judges, police chiefs—were beginning to become the exclusive purview of blacks and women. Then came one of those breaks, such as when Frank Sinatra inadvertently encountered an arranger named Nelson Riddle and began the association that would reinvent the American song. Nielsen was cast in a comedy called Airplane! because its writer-directors (Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams) wanted Nielsen to play exactly one of his usual parts—a humorless, self-serious, monotonous doctor—in his usual manner. Except that everything he would say and do would be beyond preposterous.