Leslie Nielsen

Nielsen trained at Lorne Greene's Academy of Radio Arts in Toronto and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York before building a substantial dramatic career in television and film through the 1950s and 60s.

Decades before Airplane! and Naked Gun made him a comedy legend, Nielsen played it entirely straight as Commander Adams — proof he could anchor a picture without a single joke. At this stage of his career he was known almost exclusively as a serious dramatic leading man.

His surprise late-career reinvention as one of cinema's greatest deadpan comic actors has made this straight-faced early performance something of a curiosity for modern audiences familiar only with his comedy work.