It is a matter of debate as to who is the best actor to have played Sherlock Holmes. Candidates include this actor who was relatively unknown prior to taking the role.

When Jeremy Brett earned the part of Sherlock Holmes in Granada Studio's long running television series, he brought a complexity to the role unmatched by others. His Holmes was mercurial, intense, sensitive, and melancholic -- characteristics that were part of the detective and Brett's own personalities.

Jeremy Brett, the Actor

Peter Jeremy William Huggins was born in 1933 in England, the youngest of three boys born to Colonel Henry and Elizabeth Huggins. At an early age, he developed an interest in acting and in 1951 entered London’s Central School of Drama. Because of disappointment in Jeremy’s career choice, his father forbade the young actor from using the family name. In accordance with his wishes, Jeremy chose the name of a manufacturer of a suit that he owned, Brett & Co.

For thirty years starting in the mid-1950s, Brett found steady work on the stage, screen, and television, both in England and America. His roles ranged from Shakespeare to Dracula. He played Audrey Hepburn’s brother in War and Peace (1956) and her suitor in My Fair Lady (1964). He even played Dr. Watson alongside Charlton Heston’s Holmes in the 1980 Los Angeles stage production, The Crucifer Blood.

Respected by his peers, Brett was relatively unknown to the general public until 1984. In that year, Britain’s Granada Studios offered him a role that would become the hallmark of his career and would gain him highly acclaimed recognition on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes

When Brett took the part of Holmes, he could not have guessed that it would last for a decade. The series eventually consisted of forty-one TV films, starting with A Scandal in Bohemia and including the novella, The Hound of the Baskervilles. He also appeared in a Holmes stage play separate from the Granada productions.

Brett matched the physical features of Holmes, but, at fifty, was of an age when his literary counterpart had already retired to bee-keeping in Sussex. He was able to compensate for this age discrepancy with an interpretation of the character unlike any before. His goal, Brett once said, was to give the man without a heart (Holmes) an inner life and to show the cracks in “his marble.”

Brett’s character was a man who had extreme mood swings such as Conan Doyle’s creation often did. That he was able to realistically portray these personality shifts is undoubtedly due, in part, to Brett’s own bipolar disorder. He also portrayed Holmes as a man who could be arrogant, intolerant, and impatient, while, at the same time, being a man of self-doubts and loneliness who could have feelings toward others.

Brett, a Holmes fan, insisted that the adaptations of the stories should follow, as near as possible, the originals in both plot and characters. With one or two exceptions, his demands were met. In doing so, he created a Holmes that was different from the often stereotyped perception of him. He wore a homburg hat and suits more than a deerstalker and Inverness cape. He smoked cigarettes more than pipes. Most importantly, he was not a thinking machine who never failed, and his outer image was often shown to be a veneer.

The last few years of the series reflected Brett’s own life. After his wife’s death, the actor suffered extreme depression, culminating in a breakdown in 1988. Although he recovered, Brett’s portrayal of Holmes became even more edgy and melancholic. And the detective changed physically.

Mood leveling medications caused Brett to become bloated and, along with a three pack a day smoking habit, placed a great strain on a heart already weakened by childhood rheumatic fever. His serious illness shows in his later movies. Still, he continued to fulfill his role to the best of his ability.

Jeremy Brett died in 1995, less than a year after his last Sherlock Holmes performance. For more on the life of this consummate actor, see The Brettish Empire.