George Hamilton is one of Columbo’s great repeat offenders: suave, polished, handsome, and just vain enough that you can believe he would start explaining himself into a jail cell if Columbo gave him enough rope.
On Columbo he appears twice, sixteen years apart, and both
times he plays the murderer. That puts him in the club with the likes of Jack
Cassidy, Robert Culp, Patrick McGoohan, and William Shatner: actors who got to match
wits with the Lieutenant not once, but multiple times.
Hamilton’s two killers are very different on paper. Dr. Mark
Collier is a respected. Wade Anders is a television crime host. But they share
the same essential Hamilton quality: they are men who believe charm is not just
an advantage, but a shield.
A Deadly State of Mind (Season 4)
Hamilton first appears in A Deadly State of Mind as Dr. Mark
Collier, a fashionable psychiatrist with a book in progress, a dangerous affair
in progress, and an ego that is very much already complete.
Collier is involved both professionally and sexually with Nadia Donner, played by Lesley Ann Warren. When Nadia’s husband Carl confronts them, the scene turns violent and Collier kills him with a fireplace poker. From there, Collier shifts from respected doctor to calculating cover-up artist, using Nadia’s emotional vulnerability and his own professional authority to keep himself safe.
Collier does not seem panicked for long. He
starts managing the situation the way he might manage a patient.
Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health (Season 10)
Hamilton returned in 1991 for Caution: Murder Can Be
Hazardous to Your Health, this time as Wade Anders, host of the true-crime
television series Crime Alert.
The casting is almost too perfect. By this point Hamilton’s
public image was inseparable from glamour, tan, teeth, suits, and a kind of
professional smoothness. Wade Anders is built out of those qualities.
Wade’s problem is Budd Clarke, played by Peter Haskell, a
chain-smoking rival who has damaging evidence from Wade’s past. Wade does not
just want to keep his job. He wants to preserve the heroic, public-facing
version of himself that Crime Alert sells every week. So he murders Budd and
tries to build a neat little solution around cigarettes, editing, and
television production.
This is a very different Hamilton performance from A Deadly
State of Mind. Dr. Collier is icy and clinical. Wade Anders is showbiz slick:
genial, media-trained, and always aware of the camera. Hamilton clearly
understands that Wade is not just hiding a crime from Columbo. He is trying to
direct the story.
Beyond Columbo
Outside Columbo, George Hamilton built one of the more
unusual long careers in Hollywood. Born George Stevens Hamilton in Memphis,
Tennessee, he began appearing in films in the late 1950s and won early
attention for Crime and Punishment U.S.A. His 1960s credits included Where the
Boys Are, Home from the Hill, and Light in the Piazza, helping establish him as
a young leading man with matinee-idol polish.
Later, Hamilton proved to be much funnier than the standard “handsome leading man” label suggested. His comic persona came fully into focus with Love at First Bite, where he played Count Dracula as a romantic, old-world smoothie dropped into modern New York, and Zorro, The Gay Blade, where he also served as a producer and played a dual role. Those films leaned into the George Hamilton image instead of running away from it, and Hamilton was clearly in on the joke.
Personal life
Hamilton was born August 12, 1939, in Memphis, Tennessee. He has worked steadily across film, television, stage, commercials, and reality television, and his public image has remained unusually durable: the tan, the elegance, and the old-Hollywood charm.
As of this writing he is still alive.
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