Memorial Page for Peter Falk (née Peter Michael Falk)

Peter Falk (born 16 September 1927 in New York City; died 23 June 2011 in Beverly Hills) was an American actor. Over a span of 35 years he played Lieutenant Columbo on television, the rumpled homicide detective in a raincoat who always had one more question. The role brought him four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe. He was also twice nominated for an Academy Award, earned acclaim on Broadway and made films with John Cassavetes and Wim Wenders.

Growing up in Ossining

Falk grew up in Ossining, New York, where his parents owned a clothing store. At the age of three he lost his right eye in an operation to remove a malignant tumour. He later recalled how much he had dreaded being asked what was the matter with his eye. By the time he was a teenager, that self-consciousness had gone: he had realised he could get a laugh with it.

At Ossining High School he played baseball and basketball and ran track, was a member of the debating team and served as senior class president. He first appeared on a stage at the age of twelve, in a summer-camp production of "The Pirates of Penzance". For a long time he kept his wish to act to himself. As he told People magazine in 1991, he could never tell the friends he was knocking around with: "It was too strange."

A roundabout path to acting

After finishing high school in 1945, Falk spent a year as a cook in the merchant marine. He studied at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, from 1946 to 1948, then transferred to the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1951. Two years later he received a master's degree in public administration from Syracuse University. An application to the CIA was unsuccessful; instead he went to work as an efficiency expert for the Connecticut State Budget Bureau in Hartford.

In his spare time he acted with the Mark Twain Maskers, a community theatre group in Hartford, and studied with the actress Eva Le Gallienne at the White Barn Theatre in Westport. She encouraged him to become a professional actor, and at 28 Falk quit his job and moved to New York City. On 3 January 1956 he made his professional debut in Molière's "Don Juan" at the Fourth Street Theatre. That same year he played the bartender in Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" alongside Jason Robards and made his Broadway debut in "Saint Joan".

Not every door opened. After a screen test for Columbia Pictures in the late 1950s, studio boss Harry Cohn turned him down with the words: "For the same money I can get an actor with two eyes."

A breakthrough in film and a first Emmy

From 1958 Falk took supporting roles in films. Playing the hitman Abe "Kid Twist" Reles in Murder, Inc. (1960) earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor; a year later came a second nomination, for a gangster's right-hand man in Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles. His blend of toughness and gentleness led the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper to call him "another James Cagney or John Garfield". In 1960 Falk married Alyce Mayo; the couple adopted two daughters, Catherine and Jackie.

Television recognised him too. In 1962 Falk won his first Emmy, as a truck driver who befriends a lonely, pregnant girl in "The Price of Tomatoes", an episode of The Dick Powell Show. In 1963 he appeared in the comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He turned down several offers of his own series but accepted The Trials of O'Brien, playing a talented New York attorney whose private life was less successful. The show won praise from critics, but its ratings were weak, and it was cancelled in 1966 after one season.

Columbo

After years of often playing villains, Columbo was a welcome change of pace for Falk. "I've shot, knifed and beat people in too many bloody scenes," he told TV Guide in 1972. "I like to do something optimistic, where the people try to live, not die." Columbo's creators, Richard Levinson and William Link, had first offered the role to Bing Crosby, who turned it down. As Falk often said: "Thank God he had a golf tournament."

Falk first played the detective in 1968 in the television film Prescription: Murder, followed in 1971 by Ransom for a Dead Man. In the autumn of 1971 Columbo began as one of three rotating shows on the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, alternating with McMillan and Wife, starring Rock Hudson, and McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver. The series turned the classic detective story around: viewers already knew who the killer was when Columbo arrived at the scene, and watched him doggedly piece the clues together.

Columbo was never given a first name. He had tousled hair, a lived-in tan raincoat and a cheap cigar between his fingers, and he drove a faded old Peugeot. The coat came from Falk's own wardrobe. The lieutenant would often lose his pencil and have to borrow a pen, yet nothing escaped him. Already at the door, he would stop and turn back: "Oh, just one more thing …" On German television the line was "Ich hätte da noch mal eine Frage …", and for many episodes his German voice was the actor Klaus Schwarzkopf, whom audiences came to associate so closely with Falk that he was rarely offered other dubbing roles.

Falk never tired of the character. "I love him," he told TV Guide in 2000. "He's eccentric, oblivious to the impression he makes on people. His obsessiveness is hidden by his graciousness." Police officers wrote to him as well; some, he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, sent him pictures of officers dressed as Columbo.

Awards and a return

For Columbo, Falk won the Emmy in 1972, 1975, 1976 and 1990; the Television Academy lists twelve nominations and five wins for him in total. At the Golden Globes he was named Best Actor in a Television Drama Series in 1973. In the early 1970s he also received rave reviews on Broadway as a frazzled New York advertising executive in Neil Simon's comedy "The Prisoner of Second Avenue". His first marriage ended in divorce in 1976, and a year later he married the actress Shera Danese.

In 1989 Falk returned with new Columbo films, now as part of The ABC Mystery Movie. After that series ended in 1990, he went on playing the role in occasional television films until 2003. Little about the character had changed, he said in 2000: "It's tougher to bum a match; there are a few more ketchup stains on the raincoat."

Cassavetes, Wenders and the cinema

Among his best-known dramatic films are Husbands (1970) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974), both written and directed by his close friend John Cassavetes. In the latter he played a blue-collar family man struggling to cope with the fragile mental state of his wife, played by Gena Rowlands. After Falk's death, Rowlands said: "Today we lost someone who was very special and dear to my heart. Not only a wonderful actor but a very great friend."

He was in demand for comedy as well. He called The In-Laws (1979), with Alan Arkin, his personal favourite. In Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987) he is the grandfather reading the story to his sceptical grandson, and in 1992 he appeared in Robert Altman's The Player.

For Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), shot in West Berlin in 1986 and 1987, Wim Wenders and his assistant director Claire Denis were still looking, with production under way, for an extra character to lighten a serious film about angels: a former angel. Wenders got Falk's number from John Cassavetes and called him in the middle of the night. Falk laughed for a long while at being offered a part that had not yet been written, and then accepted: "I'll do it. I did my best work this way."

In the film Falk plays himself, an American actor in Berlin to shoot a film who was once an angel. He encourages the angel Damiel, played by Bruno Ganz, to take the step into human life. Wenders also worked Falk's habit of sketching between takes into the film. Wings of Desire premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 17 May 1987, where Wenders won the award for Best Director, and opened in German cinemas on 29 October 1987.

Later years and farewell

In his later years, too, Falk kept working on stage and screen. With his friend Joe Mantegna he appeared in David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross", and in 2000 Mantegna directed him in the film of Mamet's Lakeboat. In 2005 Falk made The Thing About My Folks with Paul Reiser.

In November 2006 his memoir was published under the title Just One More Thing, the line with which Columbo always turned back one last time. In short chapters with headings such as "On the Role Overcoats Play in an Actor's Career", Falk writes about his early years as a government employee, his work with John Cassavetes and Neil Simon, and how he developed Columbo's mannerisms and appearance.

In his final years Falk had Alzheimer's disease. He died on 23 June 2011, aged 83, at his home in Beverly Hills; his death certificate cites pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease as the underlying causes. He was survived by his wife Shera and his two daughters. He was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

Legacy

On 25 July 2013 Peter Falk posthumously received the 2,503rd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6654 Hollywood Boulevard. He had been selected back in 1991 but had never scheduled a ceremony. Joe Mantegna accepted the star on his behalf, saying that his friend had never enjoyed personal accolades and would probably not have enjoyed this ceremony either: "The star is not for you, Peter. It's for them, your fans." Ossining, the town where he grew up, named a street after him, Peter Falk Place. Falk unveiled the sign himself by pulling a Columbo-style raincoat off it.