Leslie Nielsen walks on the dramatic side in ‘Clarence Darrow’

Thursday, Dec. 2, 1999 | 9:29 a.m.

Actor Leslie Nielsen began life 73 years ago near the Arctic Circle where days with temperatures of 60 degrees below zero called for short-sleeve shirts and suntan lotion.

From that frigid beginning, the star of stage, screen and television has warmed the hearts of countless audiences with roles that have ranged from the serious in such classics as "Forbidden Planet" to the absurd in such films as "Airplane!"

While his bread and butter in recent years has been movie spoofs, the role that he is most passionate about is a profound one -- famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow, who lived from 1857-1938 and championed causes of the common man, liberalism and freedom of expression.

On Sunday Nielsen will bring his highly acclaimed version of "Clarence Darrow -- A One-Man Play" to the UNLV Performing Arts Center's Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall.

The show, part of the center's series "Best of the New York Stage," begins at 7 p.m.

Tickets are $35, $45 and $55 and may be purchased through the UNLV Performing Arts Box Office, 895-2787.

The play was written by David W. Rintels and based on Irving Stone's book "Clarence Darrow for the Defense."

John Houseman directed the original Broadway production, which starred Henry Fonda in the 1970s.

Nielsen took up the role after Fonda quit, and in 1994 bought the rights to the production, which he tours with each year. Most of his performances are at universities.

Next year he plans to take the show to London's West End, that city's Broadway.

Nielsen said the play is as relevant today as it ever was.

"The issues are still alive," he said.

Darrow, who died in Chicago in 1938 at the age 81, started out as a corporate attorney for the Chicago and Northwest Railroad, but his social conscience forced him to resign during the historic Pullman Strike of 1894, when workers for the Pullman railroad car company struck for higher wages and better conditions. The strike sparked riots.

In 1895 he successfully defended Eugene Debs, president of the American Railway Union.

The victory earned him a national reputation that put him in the middle of some of the highest profiled cases of the century -- cases that attracted the attention of masses of reporters, which turned the trials into spectacles.

After World War I Darrow defended war protesters who had been charged with sedition.

Two of the most famous trials of the 20th century are important in the one-man play -- the 1924 defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb and the 1925 defense of Tennessee teacher John T. Scopes.

Leopold and Loeb, both brilliant students who went to college while in their teens, confessed to killing 14-year-old Robert Franks to see what it was like to take another person's life.

Darrow successfully argued against the death penalty in their case and the two were instead sentenced to life in prison.

Scopes vs. the state of Tennessee became known as "The Monkey Trial," which eventually was fictionalized and turned into the play "Inherit the Wind" by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee in 1955. In 1960 it became a motion picture starring Spencer Tracy in the Darrow role and Frederick March as William Jennings Bryan.

Bryan, a famous speaker of the era, was to be the prosecutor's star witness but instead became a pawn of Darrow, who defended freedom of speech and the right to teach evolution.

Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee's law against the teaching of evolution and the trial was billed as Creationism vs. Evolution.

Darrow lost the trial on one level -- his client was fined $100 for violating state law. But he succeeded in raising issues that received widespread discussion.

"I discovered Darrow in 1958 when I read Stone's biography 'Clarence Darrow for the Defense,'" Nielsen said in a recent telephone interview. "I couldn't believe such an incredible human being lived in our time."

Nielsen said he agrees with many of Darrow's liberal positions.

"Doing the play sends my mind whirling," Nielsen said. "There are a lot of things I have to think about."

He notes that Creationism vs. Evolution still exists today, with states such as Oklahoma requiring disclaimers in textbooks stating that the scientific version is not definite and still open to argument.

Nielsen's UNLV performance is part of a three-month, 32-city tour that will wind up in Anchorage, Alaska, next month.

He likes ending up in Alaska. It brings back memories of the Arctic Circle.

"It's where I learned to walk and where I got my bowed legs," he said. The bowing came from poor nutrition, which caused rickets.

Nielsen was born on Feb. 11, 1926, in Regina, Saskatchewan, the son of a Canadian Mounted Police who was assigned to a remote region of northern Canada shortly after Nielsen's birth. It was a duty the officer didn't mind since he was a native of Denmark and accustomed to the cold.

"I was just a babe in arms when we went," Nielsen said. "We had to wait for the summer months for the ice to break up on the McKenzie River so we could launch a boat."

Until he was 3 1/2 he lived at a remote outpost.

"It had a population of 12 people, five of which were my family," he said.

Besides his parents, he had two brothers, one older and one younger.

When he turned school age the family moved to the warmer climate of Edmonton, Alberta, where he rode a bicycle to school in temperatures of 64 below zero.

He attributes his sense of humor to his childhood in the cold.

"The farther north you go, the more people laugh," he said. "You better laugh, otherwise it can be very depressing."

After graduating from high school he became an aerial gunner in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

After World War II, he went to work for a Calgary radio station as an engineer, disc jockey and announcer.

He studied acting at the Lorne Greene Academy of Radio Arts in Toronto and then received a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City.

"Becoming an actor may have always been in the back of my mind, but it seemed so totally unattainable I didn't think about it when I was young," he said. "All's I knew about was snow. The idea that I could become part of the acting profession was a very remote possibility."

He said he doesn't remember a lot about life near the Arctic Circle, but he does remember movies were an important part of it.

"We only had movies, which came rolled up in carpet and played at the community hall," he said.

His uncle, the late Jean Hersholt, got him to seriously thinking about acting as a career.

Hersholt, who was a stage actor in Denmark, began his film career in the United States in 1915. He was a prolific performer until his death in 1956. He appeared in character roles in dozens of movies, such as a breakthrough performance in 1921's "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

He was president of the Motion Picture Relief Fund for 18 years and after his death, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created the "Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award."

When Nielsen finally decided to become an actor, his peers included Marlon Brando.

"I knew I couldn't be another Brando," he said. "I couldn't be that tough and violent. I was busy trying to be inconspicuous and he was trying to be conspicuous.

"But acting was never just a job for me. I always wanted to do good work. I thought about doing "Hamlet," but I realized that my bowed legs from the North would look pretty silly in tights."

Nielsen began his television career in 1950 in New York and continued through what is described as the medium's Golden Age. He performed in 46 live telecasts that year.

In 1954 he made the switch to Hollywood.

One of his first films became a science-fiction classic: "Forbidden Planet." It remains one of his favorites as well as a favorite of critics and millions of fans.

He said when he first read the script, he thought it was a fine story, but had no inkling it would become a classic.

He said the film withstands the test of time. "It's as good today as it was then. The story dealt with the monster from the id -- the monster from within."

Released in 1956, the MGM film -- which was a take-off on Shakespeare's drama "The Tempest," -- co-starred Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis and Robby the Robot.

"Forbidden Planet" has been called the best of its genre of the 1950s.

Nielsen went on to make more than 80 films and play roles in more than 1,500 television series, including several of his own -- "The New Breed" (1961-1962), "Peyton Place" (1965-1970), "The Protectors" (1969-1970, "Bracken's World" (1970) and the 1979 miniseries "Backstairs at the White House."

From 1959-1961 he played a recurring character on the Walt Disney television show in one of its series "Swamp Fox," a Revolutionary War miniseries that hit the small screen about the same time as "Davy Crockett."

It was Nielsen who, in 1992, married Bea Arthur in the final segment of "Golden Girls."

He also played a Mountie for the first time in 1995-1996 in the series "Due South."

Until 1980 Nielsen's resume was filled primarily with dramatic roles.

Then "Airplane!" hit the theaters like a pie in the face, sending his career spinning in the opposite direction.

The lampoon of disaster films exposed Nielsen's outrageously funny personality and most of his films since then have been spoofs, some of which have been more widely appreciated than others.

In 1982 he took his comic acting to television with the short-lived series "Police Squad!" Although the series received praise, it lasted only one season but resulted in several movies, including "Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad."

Other parodies have included 1995's "Dracula: Dead and Loving It," "Repossessed" (1990), "Surf Ninjas" (1993) and "Wrongfully Accused" (1998).

He doesn't object to being typecast as a comic actor.

"I'm doing Darrow," he said. "I can be serious anytime I want."

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