Just One More Thing . . .

Peter Falk, who died yesterday at 83, almost didn't become an actor. While working for the Connecticut state government in Hartford, he took acting classes from the esteemed actress Eva Le Galliene strictly out of intellectual curiosity.

Falk would chronically arrive late to acting class due to his long commute from his job in Hartford. When Le Galliene reprimanded him for it, he explained his situation. Le Gallienne was perplexed why an actor would have a job in Hartford when there was no professional theater there at the time, and so Falk explained that he wasn't an actor.

"Well, you should be," she told him. "Now sit down!"

Falk quit his bureaucratic job the next day and began his acting career. And what a career it was. While he made many movies, such as The Great Race and The In-Laws, he was best known as Lieutenant Columbo, Los Angeles police detective, in the series "Columbo." Falk played a rumpled, proletarian detective who brought down murderers in high places in a show that broke the rules of the standard murder mystery drama. The viewers already knew who the murderer was from the beginning; the suspense was in how Columbo figured it out. He got to the truth of the matter with his cerebral reasoning and persistent questions, always ending with "just one more thing." Only one mystery on the show was never solved: Columbo's first name. We were never told what it was.

As a result of the series, Peter Falk became an American - and a global - television icon. He will be missed. R.I.P.