Peter Falk, the gravel-voiced US actor who played Hollywood’s rumpled detective Lieutenant Columbo, has died at 83, a lawyer for his family said yesterday.

Mr Falk, whose portrayal of the dishevelled, trenchcoat-wearing homicide detective made him a household name around the world and earned him several Emmy awards, died on Thursday at his home.

“Peter Falk, 83-year-old Academy Award nominee and star of television series Columbo, died peacefully at his Beverly Hills home in the evening of June 23, 2011,” said a statement issued by a family lawyer.

“Peter Falk is survived by his wife, Shera, of 34 years and two daughters from a previous marriage,” it said.

The cause of death was not given. The actor had suffered from Alzheimer’s in recent years, and his wife Shera was appointed to look after his affairs in 2009.

In the hit TV show he played a seemingly slow-witted Los Angeles detective who invariably succeeded in nabbing the criminal just minutes before the closing credits.

The veteran actor also had considerable success on stage and on the big screen, scoring a couple of Oscar nominations among the more than 40 Hollywood movies in which he appeared.

Born in New York City on September 16, 1927, Mr Falk wrote in his autobiography about a life-changing diagnosis he received when he was just three years old.

“The doctor told my mother that I had cancer of the eye and it had to be removed, and yesterday was not too soon,” he wrote in his 2006 book Just One More Thing.

“I was operated on two days later,” Mr Falk wrote.

After surgeons removed his right eye, Mr Falk was fitted with a glass eye, which did not stop him from becoming a star athlete and being elected class president at school. After high school, Mr Falk joined the merchant marines and went to sea as a cook, but then went to college to study public administration. He tried to get a job working for the CIA, but his membership in a labour union while a seaman – seen as having the taint of possible communist affiliation – torpedoed Mr Falk’s chances of getting work as a government spy.

He later found employment at the post office, and then as a bureaucrat with the Connecticut state government, doing a bit of regional theatre and taking acting classes on the side.

Then in 1956, at the age of 29, he abruptly quit his day job and decided to move back to New York, declaring himself an actor.

The gamble paid off. Mr Falk found quick on-stage success in a 1956 off-Broadway production of “The Iceman Cometh,” playing opposite legendary actor Jason Robards.