Peter Falk, who marshaled actorly tics, prop room appurtenances and his own physical idiosyncrasies to personify Columbo, one of the most famous and beloved fictional detectives in television history, died on Thursday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83.
His death was announced in a statement from Larry Larson, a longtime friend and the lawyer for Mr. Falk’s wife, Shera. He had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease in recent years.
Mr. Falk had a wide-ranging career in comedy and drama, in the movies and onstage, before and during the three and a half decades in which he portrayed the unkempt but canny lead on “Columbo.” He was nominated for two Oscars; appeared in original stage productions of works by Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon and Arthur Miller; worked with the directors Frank Capra, John Cassavetes, Blake Edwards and Mike Nichols; and co-starred with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis and Jason Robards.
From beginning to end, the show cleaved to its formula: There is no mystery in "Columbo." We know whodunnit from the beginning, and we presume that he does too. All the pleasure comes from the slow springing of the trap, the unraveling of the game the victim he imagines he is playing, and Columbo's final minor variation on the phrase, "There's just one other thing," delivered with a hunched half-turn upon his arrested exit.
"Columbo," which became a series in 1971 after a Falk-starring 1968 TV movie, was of course, a team effort — it was a particularly well-written series, whose feature-length running time allowed for extraordinarily long scenes between the detective and the week's guest killer — but television is in the end predominately an art of personality, and episode after episode Falk was the product the show sold and the artist who sold the show. (He had in fact, been preceded in the role, in one-off dramas, and a stage play, by other actors.)
Columbo's rumpled, broken-down aspect did not betoken world-weariness; the show, indeed, was a comedy, a comedy of human frailty in which the murderers were usually people of means, substance and power. It was never Columbo's job to punish the unfortunate, and even in victory, he was never superior or censorious, merely satisfied and somehow amused. That humor we took to be the actor's own.
Falk was on the face of it an unlikely hero: Old World ethnic (his people were Eastern European Jews), short of stature, with a glass eye and an impudently thick head of dark hair that finally went to gray — Falk's last "Columbo" appeared in 2003, when the actor was 76, and he continued to act until he began to suffer symptoms of dementia in 2007. But all these things worked ultimately to his advantage, made Falk seem not so much "relatable" as familial: a sort of beloved, room-brightening uncle. It also accounts in part for the universality of his appeal — through "Columbo," he was famous everywhere.
Mr. Falk made the role his own in many ways. In addition to choosing the homicide detective’s car, a beat-up Peugeot, Mr. Falk plucked a raincoat from his closet as a prop device. Other running gags were based on things the audience never saw: Columbo’s first name (Mr. 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.
Mr. Falk took a circuitous route to acting, having 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 kindhearted truck driver who picks up a pregnant hitchhiker in “The Price of Tomatoes’’ (1962), part of “The Dick Powell Show’’ anthology series.
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