365 Days of Columbo: July 29th

Happy Birthday Lloyd Bochner

Canadian actor Lloyd Bochner was born in Toronto on July 29, 1924.

Bochner appeared in 1973’s The Most Dangerous Match as Mazoor Berozski, the domineering coach of chess champion Tomlin Dudek. 

Bochner enjoyed a long career in American and Canadian television. His later roles included Cecil Colby in Dynasty and the voice of Mayor Hamilton Hill in Batman: The Animated Series. 

He died on October 29, 2005, aged 81.

Remembering John Finnegan

July 29 also marks the anniversary of the death of John Finnegan, one of the most familiar supporting actors in the Columbo universe.

Finnegan died from complications of pneumonia in Palm Desert, California, on July 29, 2012. He was 85. The Television Academy and Variety credited him with 12 appearances in the series between 1972 and 2003.

Unlike the show’s celebrated murderers, Finnegan usually played ordinary working men, policemen and public employees—the sort of people Columbo encounters while patiently assembling a case. His characters included construction foreman Carl in Blueprint for Murder, a maintenance worker in The Most Dangerous Match, a police sergeant in Lovely but Lethal, Lieutenant Duffy in A Friend in Deed and a security guard in Last Salute to the Commodore.

He later appeared as a stage crew member in Fade in to Murder, police chiefs in Columbo Cries Wolf and Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star, and Barney—the proprietor of Columbo’s favored chili joint—in It’s All in the Game and Strange Bedfellows.

Finnegan was also a longtime friend of Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. He worked repeatedly with Cassavetes and appeared alongside Falk in films including The In-Laws and Big Trouble. That personal connection may help explain why he fits so naturally into Columbo’s world: his performances have the comfortable, unforced quality of an actor among trusted colleagues.

Farewell to the Tricon Clerk

Actress Ann Coleman reportedly died on July 29, 2023.

Coleman is remembered by Columbo viewers for one brief but unforgettable scene in An Exercise in Fatality. She plays the unnamed Tricon Industries clerk who forces an increasingly impatient Columbo to wait while she retrieves information from the company’s painfully slow computer system.

Coleman was not identified in the original credits, and her identity remained uncertain for decades before later research connected her with the role.