Happy birthday to the man himself: Peter Falk
There's no getting around who we have to start with. Peter Michael Falk was born on this day in 1927 in Manhattan, the son of Michael Peter Falk, who ran a clothing and dry goods store, and his wife Madeline. The family was Jewish, and young Peter grew up in Ossining, New York, where he attended Ossining High School and was, fittingly for a future leading man, president of his class.
Falk's path to Hollywood wasn't a straight line. He studied political science and public administration, and before turning to acting full-time he worked as an efficiency expert for the Connecticut state budget bureau. Once he committed to the stage, though, things moved quickly — he made his Broadway debut in 1956, and by 1962 had already picked up an Emmy for his work on The Dick Powell Show, years before Columbo ever entered the picture.
Falk first played the rumpled lieutenant in the 1968 pilot Prescription: Murder opposite Gene Barry, then again in the 1971 pilot before the character got his regular series slot on NBC later that year. He'd go on to play Columbo across three decades and two networks — NBC from 1971–1978, then ABC from 1989–2003 — collecting four Emmys for the role (1972, 1975, 1976, 1990) along the way, plus a Golden Globe in 1973. It's genuinely hard to think of an actor and a character more thoroughly fused in the public imagination.
Falk passed away on June 23, 2011, at age 83, following a battle with Alzheimer's-related dementia. Even now, well over a decade later, it's his shambling raincoat and "just one more thing" that most people picture when they hear the name Columbo.
Happy birthday Anne Francis
Anne Lloyd Francis was also born on September 16th — three years after Falk, in 1930 — and in the exact same town: Ossining, New York.
Francis had already built a substantial career by the time she showed up in Columbo. She'd appeared in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and Blackboard Jungle (1955), and become something of a science-fiction icon as Altaira in Forbidden Planet (1956). In the mid-'60s she headlined Honey West, one of the first American TV series built around a female detective lead, which earned her a Golden Globe win and an Emmy nomination.
Francis appeared in Columbo twice. In Season 1's Short Fuse (1972), she played Betty Bishop, executive secretary to Roddy McDowall's unstable chemist Roger Stanford — a woman who ends up a target precisely because of how much she knows about the family business. Then in Season 2's A Stitch in Crime (1973), she took on the role of Nurse Sharon Martin, the murder victim whose suspicions about Leonard Nimoy's calculating Dr. Mayfield set the whole plot in motion. Two appearances, two very different fates — but both showcase the kind of sharp, grounded performances Francis was known for.
She died on January 2, 2011, at age 80, just months before Falk himself would pass. Two Ossining natives, born on the same date, gone within the same year.
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