He was the first great Sherlock Holmes. But few will have heard of US actor William Gillette.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

6. I'm the biggest Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fan I know

I live and breathe Sherlock Holmes novels and stories and the Brett and Rathbone incarnations on the screen which I love. I wish I could disappear back into that era. I'm not a big fan of Cumberbatch, but I'm more a purist. Christopher Lee did an excellent Holmes, although in a real low budget film. Peter Cushing was fantastic, I thought, as Holmes. I'm also a big fan of the horror and fantasy fiction from the 1800s and early 1900s. I've read that the pipe most associated with Holmes, the large bent Calabash pipe with a meerschaum bowl fitting into a gourd was an addition of Gillette, because a small pipe wouldn't be noticed on the stage. In the Holmes stories, they mention three pipes, a briar churchwarden, a cherrywood pipe, and his favorite, a white clay pipe turned black from the nicotine and smoke. Gillette I believe wrote the stage play of Sherlock Holmes, consisting of an extensive rewrite of a play started by Conan Doyle. It was later loosely adapted into the Basil Rathbone period Holmes movie The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, the only Basil Rathbone Holmes portrayal occurring back in the Victorian era.

I had heard a lot of William Gillette the stage actor who played Holmes on the stage. I never knew there was a surviving movie showing Gillette in his famous role. I'd love to see it.