Several generations lay claim to having “the” Sherlock Holmes. Entertainment mediums have evolved, from stage to film to television. Gillette was the definitive stage Holmes. Charles Brookifield was the first man to portray Holmes in a short skit entitled “Under the Clock” in 1893. John Webb was the first actor to do a stage play as Holmes in 1894. It was titled “Sherlock Holmes.” Gillette’s play was first performed five years later. However, even few Holmes fans remember those two men.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a five-act play, which Gillette extensively rewrote and starred in for thirty-four years. “Sherlock Holmes – A Drama in Four Acts” opened in 1899 in New York City. It was a smash and he took it to London in 1901. He made his final performance on stage in 1932. However, he would perform the play on radio for CBS in 1935. In 1930 he had become the first man to perform Sherlock Holmes on radio.
It was Gillette who made the deerstalker cap a fixture by wearing it in his play. He was responsible for the calabash pipe. He found he could not speak his lines with a straight pipe clenched in his teeth. So, he went with the curved meerschaum. When Frederic Dorr Steele began illustrating Holmes stories for Collier’s Weekly in 1903, he used Gillette as his model. So it was that William Gillette became THE image for millions of Holmes fans all over the world. It is estimated that Gillette appeared as Sherlock Holmes over 1,300 times on stage. That would only place him third on the all-time list. He made one film, a silent adaptation of the play, in 1916.
Gillette wrote another Holmes play, a strange one-act parody in which Holmes never spoke, titled The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes. The comedy was well received. A piece of Holmes lore is that during Gillette’s 1903 tour of England, a youngster named Charles Chaplin played the role of Billy. Chaplin would repeat the role in “Predicament.” Gillette certainly ranks among the definitive Holmes’.