Bert Freed (November 3 1919 — August 2 1994) was the first actor to portray "Detective Columbo" on television.

Freed was an American character actor who appeared in the Broadway musical The Day Before Spring in 1945 and dozens of television shows between 1947 and 1985. A prominent role was as the villainous Ryker in the television series Shane, in which Freed added a touch of realism by beginning the show clean-shaven and growing a beard from one week to the next, never shaving again through the season.

Freed played Columbo in a live 1960 episode of the "Chevy Mystery Theatre" seven years before Peter Falk played the role. Thomas Mitchell also played the part on stage prior to Falk's version, which is probably where many of the eccentric Columbo traits originated; only a few were visible in Freed's straightforward interpretation, although the character as played by Freed is recognizably Columbo.

Freed appeared as a marine sargent in Halls of Montezuma (1950), as the hangman in Hang 'Em High (1968), and as Bernard's father in Billy Jack (1971) in which he got "whumped" on the side of the face by Billy Jack's right foot "just for the hell of it.".

During the '50s and '60s it seemed like every time you turned around, there was Bert Freed as a detective, gangster, sheriff or greedy small-town businessman, and sci-fi fans will remember him as the police chief taken over by the Martians in the classic Invaders from Mars (1953). He played a lot of tough cops--sometimes crooked ones, sometimes racist ones, sometimes violent ones, sometimes a combination of all three--and a lot of tough soldiers, but he could also play a jovial family patriarch when called upon. Born and raised in New York, Freed began acting while attending Penn State University, and made his Broadway debut in 1942. His film debut occurred, oddly enough, in a musical--Carnegie Hall (1947)--and he went on to play everything from a gangster in a Ma and Pa Kettle movie (Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town (1950) to a French army sergeant--a first-rate job, too--in the classic Paths of Glory (1957). He appeared in it seems like every cop and detective series on TV at one time or another. He retired from acting in 1981, and died of a heart attack in Canada in 1994 while on a fishing trip with his son.