Peter Falk Rumpled and Crafty Actor on ‘Columbo’ Dies at 83 part 3 end

Three years passed between the first “Columbo” movie and the second, “Ransom for a Dead Man,” which became the pilot that launched the show as a regular network offering. It was part of a revolving wheel of Sunday night mysteries with recurring characters that appeared under the rubric “NBC Mystery Theater.” The first set included “McCloud,” with Dennis Weaver, and “McMillan and Wife,” with Rock Hudson and Susan St James. Blog

In between, Mr. Falk made “Husbands,” the first of his collaborations with his friend, Mr. Cassavetes. The others were “A Woman Under the Influence” in 1974, a brutally realistic portrayal of a marriage undermined by mental illness, directed by Mr. Cassavetes, for which Mr. Falk’s co-star and Mr. Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands, was nominated for the Academy Award; and “Mikey and Nicky” in 1976, a dark buddy comedy directed by Elaine May in which the two men played the title roles.
In 1971 he once again returned to Broadway, in Neil Simon’s angry comedy “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.”
In later years, Mr. Falk starred in several notable films — “Murder by Death” (1976), “The In-Laws” (1979), “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “Tune In Tomorrow” (1990) among them — and in 1998 he opened Off Broadway in the title role of Arthur Miller’s play “Mr. Peters’ Connections,” a portrait of an older man trying to make sense out his life as it comes to an end.
By that time, however, Mr. Falk and Columbo had become more or less interchangeable as cultural references. Mr. Peters, Ben Brantley wrote in his review of the play in The Times, “is as genuinely perplexed as Columbo, his aggressively rumpled television detective, only pretends to be.”
Mr. Falk is survived by Ms. Danese, his second wife, and two daughters, Jackie and Catherine.