You may remember t’other day I put up a picture, actually a gif, of Peter Falk walking in a scene from Wings of Desire. Below is Bruno Ganz in the same movie, playing an angel. Can angels walk? Yes, I suppose they can, though I don’t suppose they have to.
I was led to other pictures of Peter Falk walking, some of them in Beverley Hills, in 2008, on an occasion when he was in great distress caused perhaps by the presence of paparazzi, and certainly by the dementia that he experienced towards the end of his life. Some of these pictures are shocking and terrible, and I think it would be wrong to show them again, but here he is after he’s been calmed down by a cop. Still not looking his best.
I headlined that original post ‘Wing Walking: No, Not That Kind,’ so as to distinguish it from this kind of wing walking:
I does look terrifying but then I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad, as long as you were firmly lashed to the plane, what could go wrong?
And then I heard that at the weekend, at the Bournemouth Airshow, a plane piloted by David Barrell and carrying a wing walker named Kirsten Pobjoy, plunged into Poole Harbour.
But to return to Peter Falk. I never knew anything about his private life but according to a website titled The Life and Times of Hollywood he was quite the womanizer. For instance he spotted Shera Danese walking through the streets of Philadelphia and chased her begging for a date. He was, of course, married to somebody else at the time.
‘She wasn’t interested,’ Falk said. ‘I kept at it. She conceded to a hello over a cocktail.'
Reader, he married her, though by all accounts he continued to womanize. She appeared in six episodes of Columbo, though not as Mrs Columbo (obviously).
