PETER FALK, the raspy-voiced actor who won four Emmy Awards as the deceptively rumpled homicide detective Lieut Columbo, a character he played on television for more than 30 years, died on Thursday at his home in Beverly Hills, California, according to a family statement.
He was 83 and had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Starting with a made-for-TV movie in 1968, Columbo became the role that cemented Falk’s place in popular culture and tended to overshadow his powerful series of dramatic portrayals and skilful comic work in film for directors including Frank Capra and John Cassavetes.
Few actors were as linked to one role for so long as Falk, whose cockeyed glare from a glass right eye and slightly dishevelled appearance hid a compelling dramatic intelligence he brought to the part. Columboran on NBC for most of the 1970s, and ABC revived the franchise for nearly two dozen TV specials, the last of which aired in 2003.
Falk did not originate the role of Lieut Columbo of the Los Angeles police. Bert Freed first played Columbo in a 1960 teleplay. Nor was Falk the front-runner for the part when NBC wanted to revive the character in 1968 for a made-for-TV movie, Prescription: Murder.The network hoped to cast Bing Crosby for that programme.
"An agent called and said that Crosby was scheduled to play golf and couldn't turn it down to go over and talk" to the show's creators, Falk told the Washington Postin 1990. "He did love golf. I play too, but I went over and talked to them."
Columbocreators Richard Levinson and William Link modelled the detective after the crazy-like-a-fox sleuth in the French suspense classic Les Diaboliques(1955). Falk made the role his own in many ways.
In addition to choosing the homicide detective’s beat-up Peugeot, Falk plucked a raincoat from his closet as a major prop device. Other running gags were based on things withheld from the audience: Columbo’s first name (Falk joked that it was “Lieutenant”) and his wife.
To catch suspects off guard, Columbo would often fish a shopping list out of his trench coat instead of a crucial piece of evidence. He could procure an inadvertent confession by prefacing his question with a seemingly harmless, “Just one more thing...” The actor named his 2006 memoir after that catchphrase.
Falk had been a merchant marine cook and government efficiency expert before rising to prominence as a stage actor in the mid-1950s. He won his first Emmy as a kind-hearted truck driver who picks up a pregnant hitchhiker in The Price of Tomatoes(1962), part of The Dick Powell Showanthology series.
In Murder, Inc(1960), his breakthrough film, Falk was a hit man of chilling intensity. The next year, he played a Damon Runyon comical mobster in Capra's Pocketful of Miracles(1961).
Those Academy Award-nominated performances catapulted Falk into other high-profile productions, mostly in farcical roles, including the taxi driver in Stanley Kramer's ensemble comedy It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World(1963) opposite Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, and the 1964 Frank Sinatra crime caper Robin and the 7 Hoods(1964).
He continued to showcase a comic side, often as a farcically inept loser, in films including The Great Race(1965) with Jack Lemmon, Murder by Death(1976) and The Brink's Job(1978). He also was Alan Arkin's wildly unpredictable potential relation in The In-Laws(1979).
Falk displayed improvisational talent in two soul-baring films by his close friend Cassavetes, Husbands(1970) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974). The second offered a particularly harrowing example of Falk's range. L os Angeles Timesfilm critic Charles Champlin praised the actor for creating "one of the most complex and contradictory portraits in his career" as a blue-collar worker who bullies his mentally fragile wife (played by Gena Rowlands).
In addition, Falk was the wry grandfather in Rob Reiner's comic fairy tale The Princess Bride(1987) and a fictitious version of himself in German director Wim Wenders' fantasy drama Wings of Desire(1987), which capitalised on Falk's public identity as Columbo.
“I’ve been asked a few thousand times how much of Columbo is Falk and vice versa,” he wrote in his memoir. “For years I’ve had a stock answer: ‘I’m just as sloppy as the lieutenant but not nearly as smart.’ That was a quickie response for the media. The truth is, no one is like Columbo. He’s unique – if he were up for auction, he would be described as ‘one of a kind – a human with the brain of Sherlock Holmes who dresses like the homeless’.”
Falk's first marriage ended in divorce. In 1976, he married actress Shera Danese. Besides his wife, survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Catherine and Jackie Falk. – ( Washington Post-Bloomberg)