First of all, thanks for that! I enjoyed the read!
Second, while Brett was certainly a big influence in my own reading/watching of Sherlock Holmes, I have enjoyed the current BBC show and Elementary. I never saw anything earlier than Brett, which is my loss, so can’t compare to any others.
vislor
What, no love for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes? Granted, it’s not period Holmes, but I like the take on him as a high-functioning sociopath.
This thread was started in 2003, which predates ‘Sherlock’ by quite a few years. 
That said, I think Brett’s performances are magnificent; as honest a human portrayal as can be, while still being a clear outsider to much of humanity. He’s a joy to watch, and delivers a master class in acting at almost every moment. All the other Slim Shadys are just imitating.
Couldn’t agree more. Brett is still 'way out in front and is, I think, truest to Conan Doyle’s vision.
Even Homer nods, and there were some episodes that were…hm…not as good as others. “The Sussex Vampire” (re-titled, for some reason, “The Last Vampyre”) was, alas, a bit of a stinker. Pity, as it’s one of the best of the original stories!
The old Basil and Nigel show was fun, to be sure. Many of us groan watching these for the ham-fisted portrayal of Watson as a hopeless boob. Stepping into buckets of soapy water, etc. Very badly overdone.
David Burke and Edward Hardwicke were infinitely better. (Personally, I like them both about equally. Is there a strong fannish preference for one over the other?)
Brett is the truest Holmes and should be the standard for the future .I find echoes of his portrayal in the recent Robert Downey movies which i take as homage
I’ll take Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller any day of the week.
I dearly love Benedict Cumberbatch, but Jeremy Brett does the very best Sherlock Holmes. His speech, mannerisms, appearance - they’re all spot-on.
It was heartbreaking to see him grow so ill as the show progressed. I can’t watch the last several episodes because of this.
I love Brett as Holmes, but I like the Clive Merrison/Michael Williams radio duo to be the best pairing. Clive plays an excellent Holmes, and Williams doesn’t play Watson as a blithering idiot. Well worth tracking down their series, and they’re the first pair to have done all of the original short stories and novels.
Not as well known as it ought to be: Christopher Lee and Patrick McNee in “Holmes and the Leading Lady.”
Among other things, pay attention to the music. Very lovely stuff, some of the most understated elegance I’ve ever heard in movie music.
The movie isn’t the greatest thing ever. IMDB gives it six stars out of ten. I’d have said seven. But it’s pretty darn good. And, hey, Lee and McNee! Good stuff!
While I agree that Jeremy Brett’s performances as Holmes were brilliant, a real stumbling-block for me in his portrayal was the fact that for most of the episodes, he was just WAY TOO OLD to be convincing as the Holmes of the stories.
Recall that Holmes and Watson get together within a year or so after Holmes’ leaving university: Watson is not yet thirty and Holmes apparently a couplefew years younger. Jeremy Brett, born in 1933, was over fifty when the series began, and IMO he never looked significantly younger than he was (which his cigarette habit and other health issues doubtless had something to do with). Burke and Hardwicke were both over 50 in 1984 as well.
I would really like to see a thirtysomething actor, with better physical health, physique and athleticism than the middle-aged Brett possessed, tackle the portrayal of Holmes as a younger man. RDJ and Cumberbatch both bring interesting physicality to the role in different ways, but I’d like to see a classic canonical pre-middle-aged Holmes with more age-appropriate actors.
In general, the modern audience overemphasizes the cocaine (and frequently, because Holmes injected rather than insufflated, assume Holmes was a morphine/heroin addict rather than cocaine… never mind that opium was the… opiate of the times, and smoked rather than shot…). IIRC, Holmes’s fondness for cocaine was never (or almost never) a plot point, and was only mentioned a handful of times, at best, in the canon. I’d almost say only once, but I’m fairly sure it did pop up now and then. And to the extent it was a plot point, it was Watson trying to wean him off it.
Cumberbatch deserves a spot in the pantheon of great portrayals, I believe; he captures the spirit of Holmes as well, or nearly as well, as Brett did, but transposed into a modern setting.
That said, Brett remains the quintessential Holmes. While I accept, intellectually, that there may one day come along someone who better captures every element of the Holmes character, I find it terribly difficult to imagine how such a thing could be.
I know this is more than 10 years ago, but the surviving Peter Cushing Holmes series were released on DVD in a little boxed set. Since I collect different versions of Hounds of the Baskervilles, I got them. Aside from Hounds, which is a two-parter, the episodes are A Study in Scarlet, The Blue Carbuncle, Sign of Four, and the Boscombe Valley Mystery.
It’s not up to the Brett version, but it’s okay, worth a look if you’re interested in different Holmeses. The production values are about what you’d expect from the BBC in the late 1960s-early '70s, on the cheap side, and the women’s hair and eye makeup is suspiciously anachronistic for Victorian London.
However, Cushing looks like he’s enjoying himself. His Watson is Nigel Stock, an actor I only know otherwise as Mr. Pickwick from a BBC version of The Pickwick Papers made around the same time and a tiny part in The Lion in Winter. Watson is generally bumbling, but there’s one altered scene in “The Blue Carbuncle” that I really liked; when Holmes makes deductions about Henry Baker based on his hat, Watson challenges some of his assumptions, particularly that big hat/big head = smart thing and makes him defend them.
I was always fond of Tom Baker’s Sherlock Holmes in the BBC Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Tom a/ awesomely decides that Holmes should be played like Doctor Who, and b/ even more awesomely, it works.