Although many actors have played Sherlock Holmes, there were just three who became completely identified with the role in the eyes of the public: William Gillette, who played Holmes on stage from 1899 until 1932; Basil Rathbone, who introduced the detective to a mass cinema audience in the 1940s; and Jeremy Brett, who was Holmes on television from 1984 until 1994.

"Elementary, my dear Watson!"

The first great actor to define the role was the American, William Gillette (1853-1937), who adapted several Doyle stories to create two stage plays. Gillette gave more than 1,300 stage performances as Holmes around the world, and was still playing him in his late 70s. It was Gillette who gave Holmes his deerstalker hat, Inverness cape and curved "calabash" pipe. Though shown in some illustrations, the cape and deerstalker are never mentioned in the stories, where Holmes's headgear is more usually a shiny top hat. While Doyle's detective smokes a straight pipe, Gillette found it easier to deliver his lines with a curved one, which did not hide his features. He also invented the catchphrase, "Elementary, my dear Watson!"

In 1899, six months before his first performance as Holmes, Gillette went to meet Doyle in Ulster. He arrived at the train station wearing full costume, walked up to Doyle and looked him up and down with a magnifying glass before declaring, "Unquestionably an author!" This was the beginning of a long friendship between author and actor.

Gillette played Holmes as a heroic man of action, who is much more emotional than the fictional detective. In the first Gillette play, Holmes even falls in love - despite Doyle's Holmes having an aversion to women. In spite of these innovations, Doyle loved Gillette's performance and wrote to him, "My only complaint is that you made the poor hero of the anaemic printed page a very limp object as compared with the glamour of your own personality."

See William Gillette as Holmes here

Holmes in Hollywood

In 1939, Basil Rathbone (1892-1967) starred as Holmes in The Hound Of The Baskervilles, the first of 14 Hollywood films in which he played the great detective. With his long face, hawk-like nose, piercing eyes and intense manner, Rathbone was perfect for the role. His Holmes was a much colder figure than Gillette's. Rathbone himself said, "I came to the conclusion that there was nothing loveable about Holmes." Warmth was provided by Nigel Bruce, who played Doctor Watson as a bumbling but likeable buffoon.

Gillette had shown Holmes injecting himself with cocaine, watched by a disapproving Watson. In 1939, drug-taking was less acceptable. In one scene in The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Rathbone's Holmes calls for "the needle". When this drew complaints from the public, Holmes's drug habit was dropped from all the later films. A more serious break with tradition was the resetting of many of the stories in the 1940s, allowing Holmes and Watson to fight Nazi spy rings.

At first Rathbone, who had previously played mainly villains, welcomed the opportunity to be a hero. Yet over the years, he felt increasingly trapped by the role. Strangers would regularly shout at him in the street, "Hi Sherlock! How's Watson?" - something Rathbone found unbearable. In 1946, after finishing the last film in the series, Dressed To Kill, he vowed never to play the detective again. Yet the public still thought of him as Holmes, and he returned to the role for a 1953 stage play written by his wife.

Jeremy Brett

From 1984 until 1994, the English actor Jeremy Brett (1933-1995) starred in 42 episodes of Granada's Sherlock Holmes television series. Brett brought a completely fresh interpretation to the role, rejecting the curved pipe and deerstalker which had been used by every actor since Gillette. Where Rathbone's Holmes had been still and reserved, Brett made him energetic, excitable and liable to explosive outbursts. It was a very physical performance - entering a room to look for clues, Brett would sniff the air and run his fingers across the walls.

Unlike Gillette and Rathbone, who both resented being typecast as Holmes, Brett saw the role as a wonderful opportunity to grow as an actor. Before playing Holmes, he had specialised in romantic leading roles, which had not stretched him, and which he was growing too old to play. He found the character of Holmes both fascinating and challenging, describing him as "this genius, this animated spider", and declaring that "Trying to be Sherlock Holmes is like trying to catch an arrow in mid-flight". Brett also had much better scripts than those of Gillette or Rathbone. While Gillette had been forced to perform the same two plays for year after year, and Rathbone had been given wartime propaganda, Brett's series dramatised the original Doyle stories.

Shortly before his early death, Brett looked back at the Granada series with gratitude: "To everyone who has worked on these films of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories in the past decade, only one word can express how I feel: Bravo! Holmes has finally given me recognition as a real actor, not just an aging pretty face.''