Word: falk
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...which is something new for Falk. The short, stocky actor was born 46 years ago in Ossining, N.Y., where his parents still run Falk's Department Store. Despite the loss of his right eye as the result of a tumor when he was three, he grew up a hell-raising street kid and amateur athlete, who also managed to become president of his high school senior class...
...Falk went to work as a "management analyst" for the State of Connecticut and, on the side, started acting in community-theater groups. He had flirted with the theater in high school and college but had quashed any thoughts of an acting career. "The truth was," he explains, "I was afraid I'd fail. When you're a kid, certain things are out of the question, they're so alien. Ordinary people didn't become actors, especially people from Ossining...
Then he began taking classes with Eva Le Gallienne in Westport, Conn. Late for class one day, he excused himself by saying that he was not an actor. "You should be," Le Gallienne snapped. "That's when it hit me," says Falk. "Finally someone I believed in-a really formidable woman, no bullshitter -told me what I knew I wanted...
...Eyes. Less than a month later, Falk, then 26, landed a role in an off-Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh, and for the next eight years he worked steadily, mostly as a heavy, in TV and films. At one point Columbia Pictures summoned him to Hollywood for a screen test but did not sign him. "For the same price," said Columbia's boss Harry Cohn, "I can get an actor with two eyes...
Nobody knows which two-eyed actor Cohn finally hired, but in the next two years one-eyed Falk won two Oscar nominations (for his portrayals of the vicious killer Abe Reles in Murder, Inc. and the Brooklyn hood in Pocketful of Miracles). His career then settled into a series of forgettable Hollywood films (The Great Race, Castle Keep, Luv) and a sprinkling of Italian epics. A TV series in 1965, The Trials of O'Brien (in which he played a slobbish lawyer similar to Columbo), folded after one season...