Peter Falk dead: Columbo star dies aged 83

Peter Falk, 83, who created one of TV's greatest detectives, died Thursday at his home in Beverly Hills. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for several years. A family representative said he died in his sleep.

Mr. Falk won four Emmys for the title role in Columbo, which was one of three rotating NBC Sunday mystery movies from 1971 to '77. Eleven years after it ended, he reprised the role with new films for ABC.

They may never have heard Lt. Columbo's first name, but fans around the world thought of him as a friend. In his rumpled raincoat and baggy brown suit, he spoke in a voice that no cough-drop manufacturer would ever sponsor, inspiring the contempt of all the villains he encountered.

Every rich and snotty one of them thought the squinting and shambling Columbo was a boob, and spent almost all of each episode putting him down - until he snapped on the cuffs just in time for the closing credits.

Mr. Falk appeared in nearly 50 feature films and worked on the stage. But for millions of viewers, he will always be Columbo, driving a wheezing 1959 Peugeot, lighting a cheap cigar, and interrupting his exit from a mansion to rattle a suspect with, "Oh, just one more thing."

Sometime afterwards Columbia Studios chief Harry Cohn is said to have rejected him for a part declaring: “For the same money, I can get an actor with two eyes!”

But it was for his role as Columbo in the 70s that Falk will be best remembered. In the end, sadly, he did not even remember the cult show that made him a household name.

He won four Emmys and a Golden Globe as the persistent Los Angleles lieutenant whose catchphrase whenever he turned to go was, “Just one more thing...”

The popular whodunit-style drama has been shown for more than 30 years in 40 countries – with possibly a record number of repeats.

Mirror film reviewer David Edwards last night described Columbo as “the 20th Century’s most memorable TV detective”.

And British comedian Steve Furst tweeted: “I hope Peter Falk walked to death’s door and turned round to say, ‘Oh, just one more thing...’ ”

Falk leaves his actress wife Shera Danese, 61, and daughters Catherine and Jackie, who he adopted with his first wife, Alyce Mayo.

Peter Falk, TV’s ’Columbo’; excelled in stage, film roles

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.