Jeremy Brett: The Definitive Holmes

There have been many great actors who have graced the threshold of 221B Baker Street in the role of Sherlock Holmes. And some awful ones as well. Everyone has their favorite. Their definitive. From Basil Rathbone's sharp, upbeat, and energetic portrayal to most recently Benedict Cumberbatch's more moody and melancholy take on the character.

For me it was Jeremy Brett.

The series he did for Granada Television (shown in the States on the PBS Series Mystery!) was really the first time both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson were portrayed the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had written them. Watson especially who had, with the exception of a handful of films, had always been depicted as a blithering old idiot.

This all changed when David Burke took the role of Watson. Most every production that followed, have depicted Watson very much the way the Granada series did.

In many of those early episodes, I feel as though Jeremy Brett and David Burke resembled Sidney Paget's artwork so much, you would almost think they walked right out of a copy of the Strand Magazine.

Much of the brilliance in Jeremy Brett's portrayal comes from the actor's own personality. In real life, Brett suffered from manic depression. Much of this you can see in his take on Holmes. Having read Conan Doyle's original stories, this is the way I could see the character. Moody, manic, swinging from happiness to anger at the drop of a hat and taking drugs to stave off accute cases of boredom.

Although, in real life, Jeremy Brett actually wrote Lady Jean Doyle (the daughter of the late Sir Arthur) and asked her permission to have Sherlock Holmes kick his addiction to cocaine when he found out children in England looked up to the character and considered him to be a superhero of sorts.

The character is seen emptying a phial of cocaine and burying his needle on the beach in the episode The Devil's Foot.

This was also the first time I feel we also saw in my opinion the definitive portrayal of Holmes's arch-nemesis Professor James Moriarty in the form of Eric Porter.

Although the character remains in check, you do get the feeling that he could become unhinged at any moment with this face twitch Eric Porter would use as the character.

I've gone on the record (and got my fair share of grief) for saying I am not a fan of Andrew Scott's "Jim" Mortiarty from the Benedict Cumberbatch series. Which isn't a shot at the actor himself. I haven't seen enough of him to draw a conclusion of his skills as an actor. But I just don't like the whole "goofball" element they added to him.

To be honest, I liked Jared Harris's take on Moriarty in the Robert Downey Jr. film better. However, I like the Benedict Cumberbatch take on Holmes better.

With that said, I'm not going to ridicule you just because I didn't care for the Moriarty from Cumberbatch series. Or leave nasty notes about it on Steven Moffat's Twitter account telling him how much I dislike the way he has interpreted the character.

That would be stupid.

If you're new to Sherlock Holmes and have become interested in the character because of the Benedict Cumberbatch series, I would highly recommend you check out the series starring Jeremy Brett. Although, it may not be as high-octane as some of the current interpretations of the character, it is highly enjoyable.

Great Watson actors you may not know about

Sherlock Holmes's friend and colleague Dr. John H. Watson has gotten a bad deal over the years. A big part of that due to Nigel Bruce playing the character as an imbecile in the Basil Rathbone films.

This was around a time when most Hollywood films needed a comic relief. Since Holmes was the hero of the films. It fell on poor old Watson to become the blithering comic relief in the film. Which sadly followed the character for many years and many adaptations.

Sherlock Holmes does not seem the type to suffer fools gladly, so I doubt that he would put up with a bungling moron on his most imporant cases.

However, don't believe every adaptation Watson was an idiot. There are quite a few films in the years between the Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett series (and even one after the Brett series) that either succeed or nearly succeed in displaying our good doctor as the capable man and Holmes's right hand that we read in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books. Three of them I have alread mentioned in my previous blog posts. However, I think they are worth mentioning again. Here is my list of some really good Watson's that have appeared in film, television and radio:

Ralph Richardson on radio alongside Sir John Gielgud (1954-1955)

André Morell in The Hound of the Baskervilles(1959)

Nigel Stock in a BBC series Sherlock Holmes (1964-1968 first alongside Douglas Wilmer and later Peter Cushing as Holmes)

Colin Blakely The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Robert Duvall in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

James Mason in Murder By Decree (1979)

Vitaly Solomin from a Russian Sherlock Holmes series starring Vasily Livanov (1979)

Sir John Mills alongside Peter Cushing in The Masks of Death (1984)

Patrick Macnee alongside Christopher Lee as Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1991) and Sherlock Holmes and the Incident at Victoria Falls (1992)

Michael Williams in a Sherlock Holmes BBC Radio Series alongside Clive Merrison as Holmes (1989-1998)

Ian Hart in The Hound of the Baskervilles alongside Richard Roxburgh as Holmes(2002) and Sherlock Holmes and the Cast of the Silk Stocking alongside Rupert Everett as Holmes (2004)

Inspiration for Doctor Watson

Of course one of the inspirations for the way Watson will look in my graphic novel is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since the story is being told through Watson's point of view, my feeling is Doyle is Watson.



My other inspiration is pretty obscure. What really inspired my look for Watson came when I decided to do a little bit of sketching around the Worcester Art Museum after classes one day. Right after you enter through the cafe, on the left side wall, there's a painting of Stephen Salisbury III.



I had passed the painting many times without much notice. Usually I'm so busy taking my classes from gallery to gallery that I really don't have time to stop and smell the roses.

But that day I happened to look at the painting and say to myself "There's my Watson!!" which I promptly made a sketch of his look and his attire.