Word: falke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...star both of Broadway's hottest play (Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue) and television's highest-rated new series (the triweekly Columbo portion of NBC Mystery Theater). But Peter Falk is nobody's idea of a leading man, not even his own. "I'm a mutt," he says, "not a thoroughbred." A very New York mutt at that: uncurried, uncurbable, and bristling with street moxie and manners. His appeal as an actor is neatly summed up in his own description of the police detective he plays in Columbo: "He looks like...
...years, the public saw little but the dishevelment. Falk was admired in the trade as a compassionate, thoughtful character actor, but the mantle of mass appeal kept sliding off his round shoulders. In 1964, for example, TV audiences were not ready for his first series, The Trials of O'Brien, in which he played a lawyer who could not resist a crap game or meet an alimony-payment deadline. Now, after the troubled '60s, viewers seem readier to identify with a loser hero. In the ratings among TV's new law-and-order leading men, Falk...
Banal Lunch. To Falk, it long seemed impossible that he would ever be in the same league with the Glenn Fords. "I always romanticized that artists were a very special species and that ordinary people didn't become actors," he says. The son of a clothing retailer in Ossining, N.Y., Peter was ordinary people all right-a roughneck kid who dropped out of college to join the merchant marine in World War II, later got a master's in public administration at Syracuse University and spent three bemused, bored years as an efficiency expert in Connecticut...
During his first 30 months in New York, Falk found stage and TV work for all but six days. His credits included Siobhan McKenna's St. Joan and numerous TV tough-guy roles, among them an Emmy-winning performance on the Dick Powell Show...
...invited to Hollywood by Columbia Pictures, but the studio's boss at the time, Harry Cohn, vetoed him on the grounds that Falk had a glass eye (he lost his right eye as the result of a tumor when he was three). "Look," Cohn said to him, "for the same price I can get an actor with two eyes." Falk went to other studios, and in his first two pictures earned Oscar nominations in the supporting-actor category-one for his vicious evocation of Abe Reles in Murder Inc. (1960), the other for his Runyonesque hood in Frank Capra...