A lot of great actors have played Sherlock Holmes over the years, but none did as great a job as Jeremy Brett. There is no doubt in my mind that he is the greatest Sherlock Holmes of all.
My favorite Sherlock Holmes
A lot of great actors have played Sherlock Holmes over the years, but none did as great a job as Jeremy Brett. There is no doubt in my mind that he is the greatest Sherlock Holmes of all.
If you’re ever in Connecticut and get the chance, visit the Gillette Castle State Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillette_Castle_State_Park). It’s the home of the actor who is most famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes on stage. I believe he was the first person to perform as Holmes in America. It’s also a really cool, weird old house.
We’re going to have to disagree on this one. I put Basil Rathbone and Benedict Cumberbatch ahead of Jeremy Brett. I recently watched Brett on PBS and found his acting way overblown and not satisfying at all.
Cumberbatch.
I’ll first admit I haven’t read any of the novels yet, so I don’t know which is more in tune with the character. All of them give a good performance but for different reasons.
Rathbone was quite good. He was meticulous, steady and sharp, but he was almost too even keel and steely. You knew he was following the trail, and that was it. Then there’s the wartime movies. Oof.
Cumberbatch is good. I like his impulsiveness and the ease of distraction he has. You wonder if he really is on the trail some times. That makes him interesting. Showing the inner workings of Holmes’ mind annoyed me rather quickly. Maybe Doyle did this exposition in the stories, but I think there could have been a better way to represent it, or just not do it at all. I was not a fan of the modern setting. Too many changes to good characters and plots that weakened them.
Brett, too, is my favorite. He was just as sharp and meticulous, but that “overblown” element was the character’s impulsiveness, probably a result of his seven percent solution. Brett’s Holmes was on the trail. He might wander for a moment, but he will leap back to it and be closer to the answer.
Rathbone and Brett were set in period, which made the stories work properly.
As much as I love Elementary and Sherlock, to be the “definitive” Holmes, it has to be in the original period. I watched most of the Jeremy Brett series as it came out to American audiences on PBS’s Mystery!,. For me, Brett will be THE Sherlock Holmes.
Brett was a phenomenal choice to play the part, and his Holmes was the most accurate to the original stories (and, I daresay, to the spirit of the 19th century), right down to the personal weaknesses that Rathbone wouldn’t have been allowed to show. He treated the material with as much respect as he treated Shakespeare. His Holmes is definitive for me, as are the careful, intelligent adaptations of the original stories that made for better plot structure on film.
Rathbone was a very good choice to introduce American audiences to the stories, but his producers relied too heavily upon cliché. And they tried to make Holmes seem even more superhuman by unnecessarily dumbing down Watson, which was perhaps a good choice for popular appeal at the time, but which makes those films almost unwatchable for me.
Cumberbatch does a brilliant reinterpretation, within a show that is much needed to bring these great stories to new audiences.