This is like how Angela Lansbury was only a few years older than Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate, despite having to play his mother.
Columbo seems to have a broad fan base across multiple nationalities, which is why Falk could get a leading role playing himself in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire.
My personal favorite is The Manchurian Candidate, where Angela Lansbury was 37 and played the mother of Laurence Harvey, who was 35. Of course Angela Lansbury is an excellent actress and was able to play the part very convincingly.
Ageless Timelords like Lansbury are a special case, though. She’s still the same age she’s always been.
More trivia…
A Friend in Deed was one of a series of Columbo episodes (along with Ransom for a Dead Man, Etude in Black and Dagger of the Mind) to be released theatrically in Italy in the late 1970s.
I saw this episode on late night TV once, and pretty quickly picked up that whoever directed it was talented, or at the very least was pulling out stuff they’d learned in a college film course (weird camera angles, fish-eye lens shots, etc.)
There’s even a Japanese version of Columbo that was popular for many years and is still lampooned in popular media the same way that Columbo is: Furuhata Ninzaburo.
One more bit of Columbo international love of the character trivia.
There is a bronze statue on a street in Hungary along with Dog.
Not to mention less savory occupations (yes, that’s fellow future Starfleet Captain Avery Brooks she’s leading around in chains).
Such as turning into a giant mudskipper and having Lt. Paris’s rape babies who were subsequently abandoned on a strange planet without their parents.
Later to be referenced on Lower Decks. Because every silly thing from the Star Trek universe is canon on that show
What was that from?
Roots: The Gift
To be fair on the rape part, Captain Janeway herself noted that it was just as likely that she was the one who initiated mating with Paris after they were both turned into mudskippers.
But yeah, pretty bad episode overall. Not least because of its egregiously bad understanding of what “evolution” is and how it works.
And then there’s the literary character Columbo was partially inspired by: Inspector Porfiry from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
[I first learned this from a schoolmate’s father who wrote some of the original _Colombo_ episodes and later several _Murder She Wrote_ ones – lots of alumni from the former show worked on the latter.]
I don’t know what age she was in the bottom right-hand corner but I’d like to know what she was playing.
Replying to add that apparently Jessica Fletcher and Magnum PI once teamed up, as reviewed (hilariously) here:
one of the best episodes IMO was the food one, directed by Jonathan Demme
I will see the food one and raise you a wild eyed frenzied Johnny Cash
(Not trying to argue anything, I am just looking for excuses to reference the really good episodes)
also one of the best.
edit: @Mangochin , the wine one was also pretty good, since it starred Donald Pleasance
