10 great Sherlock Holmes films and TV adaptations

No one has played Sherlock Holmes on the big screen more than Eille Norwood, who was 60 when he made the first of his 45 shorts and two features. A Scandal in Bohemia (1921), The Golden Pince-Nez (1922) and The Final Problem (1923) are the first to be released by the BFI after a painstaking restoration of the entire Stoll Pictures catalogue. 

By playing Holmes as he was written, Norwood earned the admiration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Norwood wrote in the May 1921 edition of Stoll’s Editorial News: “My idea of Holmes is that he is absolutely quiet. Nothing ruffles him, but he is a man who intuitively seizes on points without revealing that he has done so, and nurses them with complete inaction until the moment when he is called upon to exercise his wonderful detective powers. Then he is like a cat — the person he is after is the only person in all the world, and he is oblivious of everything else till his quarry is run to earth. The last thing in the world that he looks like is a detective. There is nothing of the hawk-eyed sleuth about him. His powers of observation are but the servant of his powers of deduction, which enable him, as it were, to see around corners, and cause him, incidentally, to be constantly amused at the blindness of his faithful Watson, who is never able to understand his methods.”

But Norwood was by no means the first actor to play Sherlock. This was in 1900’s Sherlock Holmes Baffled, though the actual identity of the performer remains a mystery. By the time William Gillette – who had played Holmes in his own stage version 1,300 times – made his 1916 film adaptation, Conan Doyle’s detective had already been serially portrayed by Dane Viggo Larsen, Frenchman Georges Tréville and German Alwin Neuß. 

The first British Holmes was James Bragington in a sadly lost 1914 version of A Study in Scarlet. In Hollywood, John Barrymore donned numerous disguises in Sherlock Holmes (1922) before sound came to Baker Street in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929). Clive Brook starred, but it was fellow Londoner Arthur Wontner who dominated the deerstalker in this period in five quickie cases, including The Sleeping Cardinal (1931).

Holmes became synonymous with Basil Rathbone over the next decade, as Nigel Bruce reinvented Dr Watson as an amiably buffoonish sidekick. Following their 14-film partnership, Holmes migrated to television, with Alan Wheatley solving six cases for the BBC in 1951 before Ronald Howard became America’s first small-screen Holmes two years later. Douglas Wilmer very much looked the part in a popular BBC series in the 1960s and he guested in Gene Wilder’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), which typified a parodic phase that saw Holmes being played by John Cleese in The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation as We Know It (1977) and Peter Cook in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978).

Finding new angles has since been the name of the games afoot on both film and television, with Holmes meeting everyone from Mr Magoo and Scooby-Doo to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman. We’ve had the quirky docudunit The Case of Marcel Duchamp (1984), origin stories like Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), a Disneyfication in The Great Mouse Detective (1986), a case of mistaken identity in Without a Clue (1988), a geriatric swan song in Mr Holmes (2015), and some sibling rivalry in Enola Holmes (2020). Indeed, the last three entries in our list below reflect this ongoing obsession with postmodern revisionism. 

Yet Holmes has rarely strayed from the image presented in Sidney Paget’s Strand illustrations. Perhaps it’s time he did?

Director: Alfred L. Werker

Although supposedly based on William Gillette’s 1899 play Sherlock Holmes (in which, when it came to London, a young Charlie Chaplin had played Billy the pageboy), the second of Twentieth Century-Fox’s Sherlock Holmes capers owes little to Gillette or Conan Doyle. Eerily evoking Sidney Paget’s Strand illustrations, Basil Rathbone combines egotism, eccentricity and exactitude in creating the definitive big-screen Holmes. He relishes the challenge posed by Professor Moriarty (George Zucco), who orchestrates a series of fiendish distractions to keep his nemesis away from the Tower of London. 

Doyle’s Holmes never uttered the phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” But Rathbone uses it less to flaunt his own genius than to reassure the bumbling doctor (Nigel Bruce) that he relies upon him as a wingman. When it took over the series from Fox, Universal ditched the Victorian setting and pitted Holmes against the Axis. Rathbone quit after 12 cases, leaving Bruce to team with Tom Conway in order to prolong their popular radio show for another 39 episodes.

Director: Terence Fisher

Thrilled at being cast as his literary hero, Peter Cushing not only channelled his armchair expertise into his skittishly energetic performance but also into his costumes and the 221B Baker Street set. The Conan Doyle estate was outraged that cameraman-turned-scenarist Peter Bryan took so many liberties with the 1902 novel. But Cushing’s deft tinkerings with the dialogue meant that his Holmes remained true to the spirit of the original, as did André Morell’s Watson, who is anything but a blathering sidekick. 

Production designer Bernard Robinson and cinematographer Jack Asher capitalised on Technicolor’s lustre, as Holmes was seen in colour for the first time. This was never as popular as Hammer’s first horrors, though Cushing was so right for the role that he replaced Douglas Wilmer in the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes (1964 to 1968) and later returned in The Masks of Death (1984). Curiously, Christopher Lee, who essays Sir Henry, also played Holmes three times himself. 

Director: James Hill

The first film to confront Holmes with a true-life crime, James Hill’s pairing of John Neville and Donald Houston is linked to Bob Clark’s later Murder by Decree (1979) by the slayings of Jack the Ripper. Sponsored by the Sir Nigel Films company that had been established by the Conan Doyle estate, Hill’s excursion to Whitechapel not only brought Mycroft Holmes to the screen for the first time (in the form of Robert Morley), but also sought to ensnare the audience besotted with the Adam West Batman series by dubbing Holmes “the Original Caped Crusader”. 

It also anticipates several themes that would be explored in Stephen Knight’s controversial 1976 bestseller Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, whose Masonic conspiracies influenced Clark’s adroitly politicised whodunit. Unmasking different culprits, the two features fascinate with their contrasting approaches to social context and the depiction of violence, but – while Murder by Decree is the lesser film – Christopher Plummer and James Mason make far the better partnership.

Director: Billy Wilder

Having given up on the idea of concocting a Sherlock Holmes musical, Billy Wilder originally wanted to cast Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers in a 1963 Sir Nigel Films dramedy, which centred the detective’s demons and his relationship with Dr Watson. However, Wilder fell out with his stars, and Rex Harrison and Nicol Williamson (who would headline The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, 1976) sought the lead before Robert Stephens was cast as Holmes alongside Colin Blakely’s Watson. 

Wilder regretted not emphasising the gay subtext, as he believed that Holmes’s repressed sexuality lay behind his drug abuse. Yet, while an air of melancholic longing permeates a story involving a broody ballerina, a treacherous femme fatale, the Loch Ness monster and some sinister monks, this is also a highly amusing satire on Britishness (with Christopher Lee popping up as Mycroft), and one can only lament that the 80-odd minutes removed on the orders of the Mirisch Corporation from the first cut now exist only as fragments.

Director: Igor Maslennikov

There’s a photo of him that puzzles many visitors to the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London. But Vasily Livanov is an iconic figure and was so splendid in this Russian TV series that he was awarded an honorary MBE in 2006 for his efforts. Eccentric but urbane, Livanov’s Holmes is initially regarded as a dangerous criminal mastermind by Dr Watson (Vitaly Solomin) when he seeks lodgings after military service in the colonies. However, they forge a bond during Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson (1979), which launched the five-part series with two cases, ‘Acquaintance’ and ‘Bloody Inscription’, which were based respectively on ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ and A Study in Scarlet. 

Despite not being a fan of Conan Doyle’s writing, director Igor Maslennikov proved faithful to the storylines. Moreover, he considered Holmes a subversive figure who worked outside the system, and this made him hugely popular with Soviet audiences. 

Director: Desmond Davis

Like Basil Rathbone, Ian Richardson could have played Moriarty as easily as Holmes, as is evident from the seething sang-froid that made his Francis Urquhart so chilling in House of Cards (1990). The same unimpeachable self-confidence is intact, but the sly wit is warmer in the two teleplays that Richardson made for American producer Sy Weintraub (the other being The Hound of the Baskervilles), who had optioned the three Conan Doyle stories still under copyright in the United States and took exception to the estate sanctioning a Granada series because he believed he held the rights to the characters of Holmes and Watson. 

Following a protracted law suit, a third outing was eventually made as Hands of a Murderer (1990) for Edward Woodward. Later plans for Richardson to replace Peter Cushing in The Abbot’s Cry (a sequel to 1984’s The Masks of Death) came to nothing, although he did play Dr Joseph Bell, the supposed inspiration for Holmes, in Murder Rooms: Mysteries of the Real Sherlock Holmes (2000). 

Creator: John Hawkesworth

Jeremy Brett is to Sherlock Holmes what David Suchet is to Hercule Poirot. Over 36 hour-long episodes and five feature specials he investigated 43 of Conan Doyle’s 60 cases, the majority in the company of Edward Hardwicke’s dependably doughty Watson, after David Burke had left to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

Producer Michael Cox set the tone by ensuring the money Granada saved on acquiring story rights went into the production values. But, having played Holmes on stage in The Crucifer of Blood, Brett understood he was a deeply troubled individual who needed the game to be afoot to keep his demons at bay. Yet, for all Brett’s magnetism, mischief and energy, there was a mesmeric potency about the silences in which Holmes processed the facts before making his pronouncements. Sadly, ill health dogged the actor in the later episodes, which tended to draw on lesser-known tales. Nevertheless, for many, Brett will always be the definitive Sherlock Holmes. 

Director: Guy Ritchie

The first American to play Holmes on the big screen since Carlyle Blackwell in the silent film Der Hund von Baskerville (1929), Robert Downey Jr won a Golden Globe for his display as a dishevelled bohemian, who is handy with fists and faculties alike. Socially awkward and broodingly erratic, this Holmes is unsurprised by his brilliance but baffled as to why Watson (Jude Law) would want to give up the chase for domesticity. 

Adopting an air of irreverent fidelity to the stories he had loved as a boy, Guy Ritchie keeps the action moving at a fair clip and gives it a steampunk gothic feel, as the diabolical Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) seeks to seize power in an 1890 London that is an artful mix of well-chosen location and CGI. The Oscar-nominated art design similarly reinforces the playful nature of a plotline that has grown more darkly relevant in the age of political populism. 

Creators: Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat

Devised as Holmesians Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss shuttled between London and Cardiff while working on Doctor Who, this bold BBC series gave the canonical a contemporary makeover and succeeded in enticing viewers who knew nothing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle while also managing not to overly offend die-hard traditionalists. 

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock regards himself as “a high-functioning sociopath” and relies on flatmate and Afghan war veteran John (Martin Freeman) to be his moral compass, as well as his adjutant. Embracing technology to aid their detection, the pair have an uneasy relationship with Scotland Yard and the celebrity that burgeons after John starts blogging about their exploits, although no one poses a problem quite like Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott). Amassing more than 40 BAFTA nominations, 39 Emmy nods and a Peabody Award, the series rejuvenated the brand and spawned a host of Gen Z-targeted variations, including Miss Sherlock (2018), Enola Holmes (2020), The Irregulars (2021) and Sherlock & Daughter (2025).

Director: Robert Doherty

Created by Robert Doherty and running to 154 episodes over seven seasons, this CBS bid to bring Sherlock into the new millennium cast Jonny Lee Miller as a recovering addict residing in New York, who is forced by his father to live with sober companion Joan Watson (Lucy Liu), a medic whose own reputation has been tarnished by a surgical slip and who becomes Holmes’s associate in assisting the NYPD with its trickier cases. 

While sleuthing is still central to a conceit that owes little to Conan Doyle, the series also stressed the human interest angle, as Watson seeks to become a mother and battles cancer, while Holmes deals with his demons and the scars left by his relationship with Irene Adler, who is really Jamie Moriarty (Natalie Dormer). No one has played Holmes on screen more than Miller, who tempered the predictable enigmatic brilliance with a psychological vulnerability that brought a new dimension to his bond with the good doctor.