Peter Falk as Lt. Frank Columbo in 1976
“Of course, you won’t be able to work in movies or TV because of your eye,” an agent told Peter Falk when he began as an actor in New York. Falk would later win two Oscar® nominations and earn five Emmys, four of them from a TV show where he became a regular household friend around the world.
Peter Falk, the leading man who was everything a ’50s star wasn’t suppose to look like, died today at age 83.
Like Chaplin‘s Little Tramp, Falk‘s Frank Columbo looked like an unmade bed where a fertile mind (and surpassing actor) lived.
Falk created Lieutenant Columbo with a 1968 TV movie, but the very watchable, offbeat character forced another film and finally a series that reigned from 1971 to 1978. But Falk‘s character was so eternally popular that Columbo movies continued.
Like his famous alter ego, the real Peter Falk had a considerable intellect. Returning from the merchant marine Falk earned a Syracuse University master’s in public administration, then worked as a an efficiency expert at Connecticut’s budget bureau. Sideways, he moonlighted as a community-theater actor.
Falk earned his way into off-Broadway plays then confounded that New York agent by breaking into Hollywood films in 1958. By 1960, Falk got himself nominated for an Oscar ® for Murder, Inc., then another nomination the next year for Frank Capra‘s Pocketful of Miracles. At the same time he got his first Emmy for The Price of Tomatoes.
Continuing to work regularly in film and TV, Falk occasionally returned to New York where he eventually became an established theater headliner, culminating with Neil Simon‘s The Prisoner of Second Avenue in 1971.
With his close friend John Cassavetes, Falk improvised his way through the arty Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence where other art films (and cult favorites) followed.
Born in New York City 83 years ago, Peter Michael Falk and his dry goods store-owning parents moved to Ossining, where at three Falk lost his left eye from cancer. Despite his disability, Falk became a star athlete and high school class president.
Rejected by the military (because of his glass eye) when he tried to join after Pearl Harbor, Falk got into the U.S. merchant marine where “they don’t care if you’re blind or not.”
After the war, Falk went to college for a while, but was “too itchy” and “wanted more excitement,” so he signed up in 1948 to go to Israel in the fight with Egypt, but hostilities ended before he got into combat. His itch and adventurous excitement led to wandering throughout Europe, working at interesting jobs, including a Yugoslavian railroad for half a year.
Through two marriages, three divorces, two reconciliations, Peter Falk is survived by his wife Shera Danese, two daughters, a garage-full of his charcoal drawings and about two billion people who feel a loss today from the passing of someone they feel is an old friend.