TLDR: Peter Falk spent his childhood adapting to life with one eye after surgery for cancer at age three, was rejected by the CIA for leftist connections, worked as a state budget analyst, and only got into acting at 29.
He was then rejected by Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures because of his glass eye.
He went on to earn two Academy Award nominations and spend 35 years as Columbo, becoming the highest-paid actor on television in the 1970s.
For most of the world, Peter Falk was the rumpled detective in the battered raincoat who always had just one more thing to ask.
The character was so perfectly constructed and so completely inhabited that it is easy to forget the man who built it had an extraordinary life long before anyone said the name Columbo.
The Glass Eye and the Baseball Game
Peter Michael Falk was born on September 16, 1927, in New York City, to a Jewish family of Eastern European descent who raised him in Ossining, New York. When he was three years old, his preschool teacher noticed he habitually cocked his head to one side while looking at objects.
A medical examination revealed retinoblastoma, an aggressive form of pediatric eye cancer. Surgeons removed his right eye and fitted him with a glass prosthetic to save his life.
Falk adapted with remarkable speed. He grew up playing competitive baseball and basketball, was elected president of his senior class at Ossining High School, and developed an early habit of using humor to deflect any social awkwardness surrounding his prosthetic eye.
The most famous example came during a baseball game when an umpire called him out at third base on a play Falk was certain he had won.
He walked up to the umpire, removed the glass eye from its socket, handed it to him, and said, “You’ll do better with this one.”
The glass eye shaped more than his social instincts.
The physical asymmetry it created, a trademark uneven eyelid and distinctive squint that casting agents once told him would disqualify him from film work, eventually became his most recognizable screen feature.
Budget Analyst, Rejected by the CIA
After graduating high school in 1945, Falk tried to enlist in the armed services as World War II was drawing to a close and was repeatedly rejected for his monocular vision.
He joined the Merchant Marine instead, serving eighteen months as a cook and mess boy. He later volunteered to travel to Israel to fight in the 1948 War of Independence, a decision that would come back to haunt him.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the New School for Social Research and then a Master of Public Administration from Syracuse University.
He applied to the CIA. They rejected him, not for his eye but for political reasons: his mandatory membership in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, which the agency investigated for leftist leanings, combined with his travels to socialist Yugoslavia.
He went to work instead as a management analyst for the Connecticut State Budget Bureau in Hartford, later joking that on his first morning he couldn’t even find the building where he was supposed to report.
He was twenty-nine when he finally resigned from state government to pursue acting full-time in Greenwich Village. He studied under Eva Le Gallienne, whose letter of recommendation to the William Morris Agency opened enough doors to get him started.
Harry Cohn, Two Oscar Nominations, and the Making of a Career
Falk’s early stage success led to a screen test for Columbia Pictures.
Studio chief Harry Cohn rejected him with a line that became one of Hollywood’s more infamous rejections: “For the same price, I can get an actor with two eyes.”
Falk recalled the remark in his autobiography and in interviews with characteristic dry humor, viewing it as a reflection of the studio system’s formulaic limitations rather than a personal blow, and channeling the energy into finding non-traditional paths forward.
Twentieth Century Fox signed him shortly after.
His first two major film roles earned him consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor: the mob drama Murder Inc. in 1960 and Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles in 1961.
He became the first actor to be nominated for both an Academy Award and an Emmy in the same calendar year, a feat he accomplished twice.
How Columbo Came Together
When Falk was cast as Lieutenant Columbo in the 1968 pilot film Prescription: Murder, almost nothing about the character as audiences came to know him existed yet.
Falk built Columbo detail by detail, and nearly every iconic element came from his own choices rather than from a costume department or writers’ room.
The raincoat was his own. He had bought it at a Spanish store called Cortefiel on a rainy New York day in 1967, shortly before being cast in the pilot, and simply retrieved it from his home closet when asked to find something suitable for the character.
The show’s creators Levinson and Link maintained the script called for an overcoat; Falk insisted it specified a raincoat.
When the series returned on ABC in 1989, the original coat had deteriorated enough that tailors had to construct a replacement and artificially age it by staining it with tea and running it over with an automobile in the studio parking lot.
The cigar, the car, and the catchphrase each had their own origin stories, documented in detail elsewhere.
The dog was not his. The basset hound known on screen simply as Dog was a professional canine actor named Henry, introduced as a compromise with NBC executives who wanted a human sidekick.
Falk initially strongly opposed the idea, arguing the character already had enough signature gimmicks.
When he met Henry at a Burbank animal shelter and saw the animal’s lethargic, drooling demeanor, he immediately relented.
Henry died during the series’ run and was replaced by a younger basset hound who required fur graying makeup to simulate the original dog’s appearance, a process Falk joked took longer than his own time in the makeup chair.
The Most Difficult Man in Television
Falk was not an easy collaborator.
He drove directors, writers, and network executives to exhaustion with his insistence on script rewrites, endless rehearsals, and his refusal to shoot scenes he felt compromised the character’s integrity.
He frequently walked out during salary negotiations, burning bridges that took years to rebuild.
His biographers document that during his first marriage he drank heavily and pursued other women on nearly every film set, an absenteeism from his personal responsibilities that eventually cost him that marriage.
He married Alyce Mayo in 1960 after a twelve-year courtship. Unable to have biological children, the couple adopted two daughters, Catherine and Jacqueline.
The marriage ended in divorce in 1976. The following year he married actress Shera Danese, twenty-two years his junior, in a relationship his colleagues described as tempestuous and genuinely devoted in equal measure.
Danese eventually guest-starred in six Columbo episodes, playing a different character each time. The two remained married until his death.
The Money and the Legacy
Falk’s leverage over the production was reflected in his escalating salary.
He earned $100,000 per episode by Season 3, $300,000 by Season 6, and eventually $600,000 per episode when the ABC revival began in 1989, making him at various points the highest-paid actor on American television.
His insistence on treating each Columbo as a television movie rather than a standard weekly series episode was part of what kept the quality high and the costs prohibitive enough to eventually limit the show’s run.
The closest creative partnership of his career was with Patrick McGoohan, whose friendship and collaboration on Columbo spanned 25 years.
For the full story of that relationship, including some of the most experimental episodes the show ever produced, see our profile of McGoohan and Falk.
The Final Years
By the mid-2000s, those close to Falk had begun noticing significant memory lapses.
His cognitive decline accelerated sharply following dental operations in late 2007, and then again after hip replacement surgery in 2008.
In December of that year, his daughter Catherine filed for conservatorship, publicly confirming his Alzheimer’s diagnosis for the first time.
The resulting legal battle with his wife Shera over access and care is its own story, documented in full in our profile of the daughter lawsuit.
By the time of his conservatorship trial in 2009, his physician testified that Falk’s dementia was so advanced he could no longer recognize family members or recall his own acting career.
The man who had spent 35 years playing television’s most perceptive detective could no longer remember the name of the character he had built.
Peter Falk died on June 23, 2011, at age 83, at his Beverly Hills home, from pneumonia and the advanced complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
He is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, with an epitaph he chose himself: “I’m not here, I’m home with Shera.”
Why did Peter Falk have a glass eye?
Falk lost his right eye at age three to retinoblastoma, an aggressive form of pediatric eye cancer. Surgeons removed the eye to save his life and fitted him with a glass prosthetic.
Was Peter Falk a nice person in real life?
Accounts vary. Colleagues consistently describe him as a warm, devoted friend and a passionate, generous creative partner. His biographers also document that he was a difficult husband during his first marriage, with a documented history of heavy drinking and infidelity.
How much did Peter Falk earn per episode of Columbo?
His salary escalated from $100,000 per episode in Season 3 to $300,000 by Season 6, and eventually $600,000 per episode when the ABC revival began in 1989, making him the highest-paid actor on American television at various points during the show’s run.
