Peter Falk: Human and angel
Actor Peter Falk died Thursday at 83. Everyone knew him as Detective Columbo in the crime series, but I loved him best in the foreign film Wings of Desire in which he plays an angel who had opted to fall from angelic status and live as a human being.
The movie, badly remade in the United States as City of Angels, made me hope that indeed, angels hang out in libraries and on top of buildings and hear our cries of anguish and comfort in invisible ways. And maybe, some even join us here.
Falk was the perfect angel who chose mortality. In real life, he lives on indefinitely in his great works in television and in movies, most notably Wings of Desire.