", guest starring Gene Barry, Nina Foch, and William Windom, was filmed at the
Stahl House. The character of Columbo was created by the writing team of
Richard Levinson and
William Link, who said that Columbo was partially inspired by
Fyodor Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment character Porfiry Petrovich, as well as
G. K. Chesterton's humble cleric-detective
Father Brown. Other sources claim Columbo's character is also influenced by Inspector Fichet from the French suspense-thriller film
Les Diaboliques (1955). The character first appeared in a 1960 episode of the television anthology series
The Chevy Mystery Show, titled "Enough Rope". This was adapted by Levinson and Link from their short story "May I Come In", which had been published as "Dear Corpus Delicti" in the March 1960 issue of ''
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine''. The short story featured a police lieutenant then named Fisher. The first actor to portray Columbo, character actor
Bert Freed, was a stocky character actor with a thatch of gray hair. Freed's Columbo wore a rumpled suit and smoked a cigar; he otherwise had few of the other now-familiar Columbo mannerisms. The character is still recognizably Columbo and uses some of the same methods of misdirecting and distracting his suspects. During the course of the show, the increasingly frightened murderer brings pressure from the district attorney's office to have Columbo taken off the case, but the detective fights back with his own contacts. Although Freed received third billing, he wound up with almost as much screen time as the killer and appeared immediately after the first commercial. This delayed entry of the character into the narrative of the screenplay became a defining characteristic of the structure of the Columbo series. This teleplay is available for viewing in the archives of the
Paley Center for Media in New York City and the Beverly Hills Public Library in Los Angeles. Levinson and Link then adapted the TV drama into the stage play
Prescription: Murder. This was first performed at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco on January 2, 1962, with
Oscar-winning character actor
Thomas Mitchell in the role of Columbo. Mitchell was 70 years old at the time. The stage production starred
Joseph Cotten as the murderer and
Agnes Moorehead as the victim. Mitchell died of cancer while the play was touring in out-of-town tryouts; Columbo was his last role.
program worked on a rotating basis – one per month from each of its shows. Top left: Dennis Weaver in McCloud. Top right: Richard Boone in Hec Ramsey. Bottom left: Peter Falk in Columbo
. Bottom right: Rock Hudson in McMillan & Wife'' In 1968, the same play was made into a two-hour television movie that aired on NBC. The writers suggested
Lee J. Cobb and
Bing Crosby for the role of Columbo, but Cobb was unavailable, and Crosby turned it down because he felt it would take too much time away from golf. Director
Richard Irving convinced Levinson and Link that Falk, who excitedly said he "would kill to play that cop", could pull it off even though he was much younger than the writers had in mind. Originally a one-off
movie of the week,
Prescription: Murder has Falk's Columbo pitted against a psychiatrist (
Gene Barry). In this movie, the psychiatrist gives the new audience a perfect description of Columbo's character. Due to the success of this film, NBC requested that a pilot for a potential series be made to see if the character could be sustained on a regular basis, leading to the 1971 ninety-minute television production,
Ransom for a Dead Man, with
Lee Grant playing the killer. The popularity of the second film prompted the creation of a regular series on NBC, that premiered in September 1971 as part of
The NBC Mystery Movie wheel series rotation:
McCloud,
McMillan & Wife, and other
whodunits. According to
TV Guide, the original plan was that a new
Columbo episode would air every week. However, Falk refused to commit to such a busy schedule given his steady work in motion pictures. As a result, the network decided to air
Columbo segments once a month on Wednesday nights. The high quality of
Columbo,
McMillan & Wife, and
McCloud was due in large part to the extra time spent on each episode. The term
wheel show had been previously coined to describe this format, but no previous or subsequent wheel show achieved the longevity or success of
The NBC Mystery Movie.
Columbo was an immediate hit in the
Nielsen ratings and Falk won an
Emmy Award for his role in the show's first season. In its second year, the
Mystery Movie series was moved to Sunday nights, where it then remained during its seven-season run. The show became the anchor of NBC's Sunday night lineup.
Columbo aired regularly from 1971 to 1978. After NBC canceled it in 1978,
Columbo was revived on
ABC between 1989 and 2003 for two seasons as part of
The ABC Mystery Movie followed by 14 made-for-TV movie "specials". Columbo's wardrobe was provided by Falk; they were his clothes, including the high-topped shoes and the shabby raincoat, which made its first appearance in
Prescription: Murder. Falk often
ad libbed his character's quirky behaviors—fumbling through his pockets and finding a grocery list, asking to borrow a pencil, or getting distracted by something irrelevant in the room during a tense moment with a suspect. He inserted these idiosyncrasies into his performance to keep his fellow actors off-balance. He felt it helped to make their confused and impatient reactions to Columbo's antics more genuine. According to Levinson, the catchphrase "one more thing" was conceived when he and Link were writing the play: "we had a scene that was too short, and we had already had Columbo make his exit. We were too lazy to retype the scene, so we had him come back and say, 'Oh, just one more thing.' It was never planned." Falk was diagnosed with
dementia in late 2007. During a 2009 trial over his care, physician Stephen Read stated that Falk's condition had deteriorated so badly that he could no longer remember playing a character named Columbo, nor could he identify Columbo. Falk died on June 23, 2011, aged 83. == Contributors ==