ABSTRACT
Wikipedia’s undoubtedly incomplete list of the actors who have played Sherlock Holmes in film, television, and radio runs to over ninety entries.1 Sherlockian cognoscenti endlessly debate the comparative merits of these actors’ portrayals and their respective claims to the accolade of best Holmes ever. In 2014, The Guardian ran an article entitled “Sherlock Holmes: The Many Identities of the World’s Favourite Detective-in Pictures.”2 The actors pictured were Benedict Cumberbatch, star of the BBC’s Sherlock (2010 to present), Jeremy Brett, star of the four Granada television series made between 1984 and 1994, Peter Cushing, star of Hammer’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), and Vasily Livanov, star of the Soviet television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (1979-1986). In January 2015, as an accompaniment to the exhibition, Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die, the Museum of London hosted a debate among four well-known Sherlockians putting forward their nominations for the best Holmes: Douglas Wilmer, featured in the 1965 BBC Sherlock Holmes, Jonny Lee Miller, featured in CBS’s Elementary (2011 to present); Basil Rathbone, who starred in two Twentieth Century Fox features and the 1940s Universal film series, and Brett. A few weeks later the Sherlockian website I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere ran a blog claiming that Cumberbatch is “the current generation’s Sherlock Holmes.”3 Others in the “handful of actors who have come to define the world’s first consulting detective” are William Gillette, the American actor-manager who first played Holmes on the stage in 1899, Rathbone, and Brett.4
