LOS ANGELES — Peter Falk, the gravel-voiced actor who became an enduring television icon portraying Lt. Columbo, the rumpled raincoat-wearing Los Angeles homicide detective who always had “just one more thing” to ask a suspect, died Thursday. He was 83.
Falk, who suffered from dementia, died at his home in Beverly Hills, according to a statement from Larry Larson, a friend and an attorney for Falk’s wife, Shera.
In a more than 50-year acting career that spanned Broadway, movies and television, Falk appeared in more than 50 feature films. “Husbands” (1970) and “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), both of which were written and directed by Falk’s close friend John Cassavetes, provided Falk with two of his best-known dramatic film credits.
Through a spokesman, Gina Rowlands, who co-stared with Falk in “A Woman Under the Influence,” told the Times on Friday: “Today we lost someone who was very special and dear to my heart. Not only a wonderful actor but a very great friend.”
Early in his film career, Falk received two Academy Award nominations for best supporting actor — for playing a vicious mob assassin in “Murder, Inc.” (1960) and for his portrayal of a gangster’s right-hand man in Frank Capra’s comedy-drama “Pocketful of Miracles” (1961).
Falk’s on-screen combination of toughness and gentleness prompted Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper to label the native New Yorker “another James Cagney or John Garfield — a man to replace irreplaceables.”
In 1962, Falk won his first of five Emmys by playing a truck driver who befriends a lonely, pregnant girl in “The Price of Tomatoes,” a segment of “The Dick Powell Show.”
But nothing Falk did came close to matching the acclaim and popularity he found playing the title role in “Columbo,” the crime drama for which he won four of his Emmys.
Launched with two TV movies starring Falk — “Prescription: Murder” in 1968 and “Ransom for a Dead Man” in 1971 — “Columbo” began in the fall of 1971 as one of three 90-minute shows on the “NBC Sunday Mystery Movie.”
The format of the series, created by Richard Levinson and William Link, inverted the classic detective formula: The TV audience already knew whodunit when Columbo arrived on the scene of the crime. The enjoyment for viewers was in seeing how Columbo doggedly pieced the clues together.
Columbo, who was never given a first name, became one of the most memorable TV characters in television history — ranked No. 7 in TV Guide’s 1999 list of “TV’s Fifty Greatest Characters Ever.”
