28 Nov 2010

Farewell Leslie Nielsen




It seems like only last week that I was writing a brief obit for another Canadian personality, Maury Chaykin ... and today is sad, because we farewell a Canadian legend, never mind a personality. Leslie Nielsen passed away at the age of 84, of pneumonia. He was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1926, and and the first time I saw him he was on another planet ... a forbidden planet, in fact.

Across more than 40 years I saw him in more movies than I can count, but I'll always remember him as Buck Frobisher in Due South. The show's folk lore says that the film crew didn't even know how to lace Constable Benton Fraser's Mountie boots up right, till Leslie showed 'em how when he guest-starred in an early first season episode. Turns out, his dad had been a Mountie!

Farewell, Leslie Nielsen. You will definitely be missed by about three generations of movie and TV fans. Here's the whole story on IMDB, in far more depth than I could hope to approximate here.