Happy birthday George Hamilton!
First and foremost, George Hamilton was born on August 12, 1939, in Memphis, Tennessee. Hamilton belongs to a select group of actors invited back to bedevil the Lieutenant as a murderer more than once.
His first crack at it came in 1975’s A Deadly State of Mind, playing suave psychiatrist Dr. Mark Collier. It was an almost tailor-made Hamilton role: handsome, polished, supremely self-confident and convinced that he can manipulate everybody around him—including Columbo. The episode originally aired April 27, 1975.
Sixteen years later Hamilton returned to the opposite side of the interrogation in Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health, this time playing true-crime television host Wade Anders.
Happy birthday Rosanna Huffman!
Rosanna Huffman was born on this date in 1938. Fans will best remember her as Tracy O’Connor, Dale Kingston’s girlfriend and accomplice in 1971’s Suitable for Framing. Tracy helps Kingston manufacture his alibi, only to discover rather too late that being the accomplice of a Columbo murderer is not a career with much long-term security.
Huffman returned nearly two decades later with a very small role as Mrs. Thornwood in Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo. Her connection with the series went well beyond her appearances on screen: in 1969 she married Richard Levinson, who with William Link created Columbo.
She passed away May 20th, 2016.
Farewell Arlene Martel
August 12 also marks a sad anniversary. Character actress Arlene Martel died on this date in 2014, aged 78. Known to generations of Star Trek fans as T’Pring in “Amok Time,” she had two visible Columbo roles. She played Gloria West in The Greenhouse Jungle and later the salesgirl who tangles amusingly with the Lieutenant over a wristwatch in A Friend in Deed.
Martel actually had one more brush with the series: she filmed scenes as Tanya Baker for Double Exposure, but the character was eliminated in the editing room and her footage did not make the finished episode.
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