Naked Nielsen

Leslie Nielsen has done OK for an actor whose sole professional ambition is "to maintain whatever celebrity status I have so they'll continue to invite me to golf tournaments." Now a veteran of more than 60 motion pictures, he started out in the Fifties playing manly men in sturdy adventure flicks such as Forbidden Planet (in which he got the girl and the robot) and The Sheepman (in which he didn't get the sheep). Then his career took a 180-degree turn when zany directors Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker cast him as the loopy doctor in Airplane! "They recognized that I was a closet comedian," Nielsen says gratefully. In 1988, he starred as the bumbling Lieutenant Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun, and the rest is...naked. Naked Gun 2-1/2 and Naked Gun 33-1/3 followed. This holiday season he appears in the bloodsucking comedy Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Still, he remains true to Frank Drebin, envisioning a way to extend the Naked Gun series almost indefinitely--by remaking film classics with the able assistance of Playboy Lovelies. So sit back, enjoy our Naked film festival and watch the Nielsen ratings soar.