Leslie Nielsen: Surely a peerless comedy actor ... Yes I was — and don’t call me Shirley

Any actor whose death is mourned instantly on Twitter must have done something right.

Leslie Nielsen, a jobbing, hard-working screen stalwart, found a comic niche in 1980, at the age of 54, as the deadpan centre of Airplane!, an Abrahams/Zucker disaster movie spoof in which he played an authority figure heedless of the chaos around him.

The Canada-born actor would continue to play the same character, with variations and with diminishing returns, for the rest of his life.

But Airplane! earned him a place in the comedy pantheon thanks to his peerless comic timing, arguably honed by his theatrical training and apprenticeship in live TV drama in the late Forties and Fifties.

His sonorous voice and regular features won him roles as doctors, sheriffs and judges early on.

In Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972) he played in earnest the kind of character he would later so deftly parody in Airplane! and the Naked Gun series.

In later works as Repossessed, Scary Movie 4 and Mr Magoo, Nielsen's clowning became more coarse but he was still better than the material he found himself in.

Nielsen, who even late in life would often do his own stunts, was known to be just as funny in person. In the Nineties it became customary for interviewers to offer him a smoke with the words "cigarette, Leslie?"

He'd stare at the packet and solemnly reply: "Yes, it is."