What follows is my review of the new "Sherlock Holmes" on PBS. I've focused on the differences between previous Holmes actor, the late Jeremy Brett, and the new one, Rupert Everett. Get out your reading glasses, Rgirl's going to town.
THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
After many years of absence, Sherlock Holmes returned to PBS on Sunday, Oct. 23 (scheduled to be repearted in the New York/Tri-State area Friday, Oct. 28, 10:00 pm EST; check your local listings). The untimely death of previous Holmes actor Jeremy Brett, who, starting in 1984, had created a peerless Holmes that was virtually sui generis in character. Brett was Holmes. Considering Brett’s idiosyncratic speech, movement, and facial expressions, I believed no one could ever again create such a fascinating, mysterious, complex, unique, and right-on-the-money Holmes again. Although seeming to always maintain a mask devoid of emotion, Brett could tell, or hide, volumes with the rise of an eyebrow, a look askance, or, my personal favorite, one of his speed-of-light, here-and-gone, ironic smiles.
After Brett’s death, I thought the “Sherlock Holmes” series coproduced by Great Britain’s Granada for the BBC and WGBH in Boston for PBS, would either stop forever or suffer the fate of the “James Bond” series, with producers trying to pad inadequate actors with Sean Connery’s muscularity, and I don’t mean just physical, resulting in every actor after Connery creating only a weak and often downright pathetic Bond, one that was definitely stirred and not shaken. I would rather have no new Holmes productions at all than for the intrepid detective to suffer the fate of James Bond.
However, before reviving, so to speak, the “Sherlock Holmes” series, Granada wisely let a decade pass after Brett’s death and also waited until the right actor had achieved the stature and authority necessary to bring justice to the role of the great detective.
Happily, last Sunday night lightening struck twice and gave us the return of Holmes as interpreted by yet another British actor with both the acting chops and the strong “genetics” of Holmes: Rupert Everett. Everett is probably best known to most American audiences from the Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz 1997 film, “My Best Friend’s Wedding” in which Everett played Roberts’s tall, dark, “devastatingly handsome,” and supportive gay pal. I’d seen Everett here and there in several films--whatever the quality of the film, Everett was always wonderfully memorable--and thought “My Best Friend’s Wedding” would finally be the film that would make him a star. But whether audiences were not ready for a gay leading man, although he played voraciously heterosexual men in a number of films, such as 1985’s “Dance with a Stranger,” or if it was making a film with Madonna (the 2000 howler “The Next Best Thing"), Everett’s career did not take off.
Fortunately, waiting in the wings for Everett was “Sherlock Holmes” as coproduced by Granada for the BBC and WGBH Boston for PBS. Still, as I said, I never thought anyone could play Holmes up to the level established by Jeremy Brett, who, for my money, was the quintessential Holmes, even though I only had Basil Rathbone--who played Holmes from 1939 to 1946, making fifteen movies and doing 242 radio broadcasts--Peter Cushing, Nicole Williamson, and Frank Langella to whom I could compare Brett. I say "only" those four actors since at least 75 other actors have played Holmes, according to web site Holmes on Screen,
Thus for Everett, in both the quality and number of performances that came before him, it was certainly no small task to take on the psychologically complex, remote yet charismatic detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887. Without taking anything away from the color, clarity, and carat with which Brett cut the role, Everett is a Holmes to behold, if one can make such a statement after just one episode. At least in “The Case of the Silk Stocking,” Everett reinvents the great detective once again without losing the essence established by Conan Doyle.
Everett’s Holmes, not unlike Brett’s but let’s say with more pheromones, has a subtle and aristocratic animal sexuality, Brett’s with an intellectual attraction to men, disdain for common women, and sexually thwarted adoration for the exceedingly rare woman who is both his intellectual equal and the possessor of a unique and exquisite beauty. Everett, at least thus far, seems to exude more of a hedonistic pan sexuality. Yet he can read Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis with the detachment of a surgeon exploring a tumor.
All this, of course, Everett, like Brett, keeps simmering under the surface of his Holmes, who, to all the world always appears in complete control at all times, except when Watson would find him smoking opium or injecting Holmes’s “7% solution” of cocaine--both without a whit of anything as crassly bourgeois, in Holmes’s mind, as regret--but still, faults that exemplify the genius of Conan Doyle. If Holmes had not been given faults that not only made Victorian readers truly squirm, and I dare say much of today’s middle class, but that were also looked down upon by the upper classes as proof that the poor were in all ways inferior to the rich, even though the upper classes used opium and cocaine, but unlike Holmes, in stealth, what a one-dimensional, character of all brain and no heart Sherlock Holmes would have been. Other details of Holmes’s behavior such as his concert-level command of the violin and his unabashed habit of working in possibly the most disorganized and cluttered home in the world, despite the furtive attempts by his housekeeper, the long suffering Mrs. Hudson, further serve to humanize Holmes. Both Brett and Everett play these aspects of the detective with just the right touches of pathos and humor, though each in his own way.
Other differences between Brett and Everett’s interpretations of Holmes include the way they use their very different physicalities. Whereas Brett used his relatively small build in a kind of Morse code of movement and mannerisms, i.e., all dots and dashes, which served to convey the quicksilver workings of his mind, Everett. is all lank and stride. Everett moves like a loping cat, using his leaping brain and wily instinct to literally and figuratively keep himself one step ahead of his foe. Fortunately, both actors have the necessary thick hanks of hair that can either be perfectly combed or perfectly unruly, essential in any actor to get the full embodiment of Holmes.
Yet my favorite distinction comes at the end of what I assume will be the end of each Holmes episode with Everett. Although I don’t recall which piece of music closed each episode of the Brett series, I can almost hear a solo violin piece by Bach. But over the credits of the Everett series plays Boccherini’s “La Musica Notturna Delle Strade di Madrid, No. 6, Op. 30.” For those who have seen the Peter Weir film “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” it is the piece Russell Crowe (Capt. Jack Aubrey) and Paul Bettany (Dr. Stephen Maturin) play at the very end of the film and that also plays over about half if the final the credits. Brett’s Holmes emphasized the precision and mathematically reasoning so beautifully embodied in Bach. Everett’s Holmes, though no less precise, uses more of his animal instincts and, when all is well, expresses a rich, albeit restrained, joie de vivre.
Speaking of credits, a number of others go into making “The Case of the Silk Stocking” promise a return to the glory days of Granada’s “Sherlock Holmes” adventures starring Brett. Ian Hart plays his Watson with just the right amount of awe and annoyance regarding Holmes; he is also both a strong character in his own right and has a good chemistry with Everett. Hart is everything a good Watson should be, including a flagrant ladies man. Hart brings his own style to his wooings, but he seems every bit as lusty as the Watson played by Edward Hardewicke in the Brett series.
“The Case of the Silk Stocking” was also sharply directed by Simon Cellan Jones, who kept the pace brisk while still allowing time for the audience to be lulled, when appropriate, into a false sense of security. The writing credits are listed, in alphabetical order, as Allan Cubitt and Arthur Conan Doyle. According to The Morning Call online Cubitt, who also adapted “The Hound of the Baskervilles” for the Brett series, refers so “The Case of the Silk Stocking” as a “pastiche” of Arthur Conan Doyle.
It’s great to be excited again about great dramatic mystery on PBS, at least in anticipation of the maintenance of this level of writing, production, and performances. It’s been too many years, at least for my taste, since the glory days of BBC/PBS's “Masterpiece Theater” and "Mystery," series that ignited or helped reinvigorate the careers of such great actors as Jeremy Irons, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson, and Janet McTeer, to name just a few of the extraordinary actors who have appeared in "Masterpiece Theater" or the now defunct "Mystery" series. I hope I’m not singing the praises of the Everett series of Holmes mysteries prematurely. I remind myself not to get too excited about future episodes, since in The Morning Call article, Rupert Everett castigated officials at the BBC as ''lazy and blind and dull'' for repeatedly producing classics in lieu of riskier material.
But then, doesn’t that sound just like something Sherlock Holmes would say?
You can learn more about "Masterpiece Theater’s" production of “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking” by going to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/silkstocking/
BIOGRAPHIES
Jeremy Brett, Sherlock Holmes in the BBC/PBS production “Mystery” from 1984 until his death in 1995.
Jeremy Brett was born Peter Jeremy William Huggins on November 3, 1933. In 1958, Jeremy Brett married the actress, Anna Massey (daughter of Raymond Massey), but they divorced in 1962. They had a son named David Huggins, born 1959, who is now a successful British novelist. In 1976 Brett married American PBS producer Joan Wilson, but she died of cancer in 1985. Brett was devastated by Wilson's untimely death and he never remarried. Brett's heart had been damaged by a childhood case of rheumatic fever, and was apparently further weakened by the various drugs prescribed to control his manic depressive episodes, particularly Lithium salt, and by his heavy cigarette smoking. He died at age 61 on September 12, 1995 at his home in London.
Rupert Everett, Sherlock Holmes in the BBC/PBS production of “Masterpiece Theater,” the first installment of the new Holmes episodes having premiered on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005. In the New York/Tri-State area, “Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Silk Stocking” is scheduled to be repeated Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, 10:00 pm EST. Check your local listings.
Rupert James Hector Everett was born May 29, 1959 in Norfolk, England to Major Anthony Michael Everett and Sara MacLean, who was Scottish, and descended from the baronets Vyvyan of Trelowarren and the German Schmiedern barons. From the age of 7, he was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, but dropped out of school at 15 and ran away to London to become an actor. In order to support himself he worked as a prostitute, or "rent boy" — as he later admitted to US magazine in 1997. After dropping out of the Central School of Speech and Drama, he travelled to Scotland and got a job in the avant-garde Citizen's Theater of Glasgow.
His break came with the 1982 West End production of “Another Country,” playing a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh, followed by a film version in 1984 with Colin Firth. He began to develop a promising film career, until he co-starred with Bob Dylan in the huge flop “Hearts of Fire” (1987). In 1989 he moved to Paris, writing a novel Hello, Darling, Are You Working? and coming out as gay, a move which some at the time perceived as damaging to his career. Returning to the public eye in “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), several films of variable success followed. In 1995 he released a second novel, The Hairdresser of St. Tropez.
Everett's career was revitalized by “My Best Friend's Wedding” (1997), playing Julia Roberts's gay friend. In 1999, he played Madonna's gay best friend in “The Next Best Thing.” His film career has been up and down since then [unless you consider yet another dud with Madonna an “up.”] Perhaps more notably, Everett has done several high “ear-file” voice roles such as that of Prince Charming in “Shrek 2.” He also writes for Vanity Fair.
Rgirl
THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
After many years of absence, Sherlock Holmes returned to PBS on Sunday, Oct. 23 (scheduled to be repearted in the New York/Tri-State area Friday, Oct. 28, 10:00 pm EST; check your local listings). The untimely death of previous Holmes actor Jeremy Brett, who, starting in 1984, had created a peerless Holmes that was virtually sui generis in character. Brett was Holmes. Considering Brett’s idiosyncratic speech, movement, and facial expressions, I believed no one could ever again create such a fascinating, mysterious, complex, unique, and right-on-the-money Holmes again. Although seeming to always maintain a mask devoid of emotion, Brett could tell, or hide, volumes with the rise of an eyebrow, a look askance, or, my personal favorite, one of his speed-of-light, here-and-gone, ironic smiles.
After Brett’s death, I thought the “Sherlock Holmes” series coproduced by Great Britain’s Granada for the BBC and WGBH in Boston for PBS, would either stop forever or suffer the fate of the “James Bond” series, with producers trying to pad inadequate actors with Sean Connery’s muscularity, and I don’t mean just physical, resulting in every actor after Connery creating only a weak and often downright pathetic Bond, one that was definitely stirred and not shaken. I would rather have no new Holmes productions at all than for the intrepid detective to suffer the fate of James Bond.
However, before reviving, so to speak, the “Sherlock Holmes” series, Granada wisely let a decade pass after Brett’s death and also waited until the right actor had achieved the stature and authority necessary to bring justice to the role of the great detective.
Happily, last Sunday night lightening struck twice and gave us the return of Holmes as interpreted by yet another British actor with both the acting chops and the strong “genetics” of Holmes: Rupert Everett. Everett is probably best known to most American audiences from the Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz 1997 film, “My Best Friend’s Wedding” in which Everett played Roberts’s tall, dark, “devastatingly handsome,” and supportive gay pal. I’d seen Everett here and there in several films--whatever the quality of the film, Everett was always wonderfully memorable--and thought “My Best Friend’s Wedding” would finally be the film that would make him a star. But whether audiences were not ready for a gay leading man, although he played voraciously heterosexual men in a number of films, such as 1985’s “Dance with a Stranger,” or if it was making a film with Madonna (the 2000 howler “The Next Best Thing"), Everett’s career did not take off.
Fortunately, waiting in the wings for Everett was “Sherlock Holmes” as coproduced by Granada for the BBC and WGBH Boston for PBS. Still, as I said, I never thought anyone could play Holmes up to the level established by Jeremy Brett, who, for my money, was the quintessential Holmes, even though I only had Basil Rathbone--who played Holmes from 1939 to 1946, making fifteen movies and doing 242 radio broadcasts--Peter Cushing, Nicole Williamson, and Frank Langella to whom I could compare Brett. I say "only" those four actors since at least 75 other actors have played Holmes, according to web site Holmes on Screen,
Thus for Everett, in both the quality and number of performances that came before him, it was certainly no small task to take on the psychologically complex, remote yet charismatic detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887. Without taking anything away from the color, clarity, and carat with which Brett cut the role, Everett is a Holmes to behold, if one can make such a statement after just one episode. At least in “The Case of the Silk Stocking,” Everett reinvents the great detective once again without losing the essence established by Conan Doyle.
Everett’s Holmes, not unlike Brett’s but let’s say with more pheromones, has a subtle and aristocratic animal sexuality, Brett’s with an intellectual attraction to men, disdain for common women, and sexually thwarted adoration for the exceedingly rare woman who is both his intellectual equal and the possessor of a unique and exquisite beauty. Everett, at least thus far, seems to exude more of a hedonistic pan sexuality. Yet he can read Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis with the detachment of a surgeon exploring a tumor.
All this, of course, Everett, like Brett, keeps simmering under the surface of his Holmes, who, to all the world always appears in complete control at all times, except when Watson would find him smoking opium or injecting Holmes’s “7% solution” of cocaine--both without a whit of anything as crassly bourgeois, in Holmes’s mind, as regret--but still, faults that exemplify the genius of Conan Doyle. If Holmes had not been given faults that not only made Victorian readers truly squirm, and I dare say much of today’s middle class, but that were also looked down upon by the upper classes as proof that the poor were in all ways inferior to the rich, even though the upper classes used opium and cocaine, but unlike Holmes, in stealth, what a one-dimensional, character of all brain and no heart Sherlock Holmes would have been. Other details of Holmes’s behavior such as his concert-level command of the violin and his unabashed habit of working in possibly the most disorganized and cluttered home in the world, despite the furtive attempts by his housekeeper, the long suffering Mrs. Hudson, further serve to humanize Holmes. Both Brett and Everett play these aspects of the detective with just the right touches of pathos and humor, though each in his own way.
Other differences between Brett and Everett’s interpretations of Holmes include the way they use their very different physicalities. Whereas Brett used his relatively small build in a kind of Morse code of movement and mannerisms, i.e., all dots and dashes, which served to convey the quicksilver workings of his mind, Everett. is all lank and stride. Everett moves like a loping cat, using his leaping brain and wily instinct to literally and figuratively keep himself one step ahead of his foe. Fortunately, both actors have the necessary thick hanks of hair that can either be perfectly combed or perfectly unruly, essential in any actor to get the full embodiment of Holmes.
Yet my favorite distinction comes at the end of what I assume will be the end of each Holmes episode with Everett. Although I don’t recall which piece of music closed each episode of the Brett series, I can almost hear a solo violin piece by Bach. But over the credits of the Everett series plays Boccherini’s “La Musica Notturna Delle Strade di Madrid, No. 6, Op. 30.” For those who have seen the Peter Weir film “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” it is the piece Russell Crowe (Capt. Jack Aubrey) and Paul Bettany (Dr. Stephen Maturin) play at the very end of the film and that also plays over about half if the final the credits. Brett’s Holmes emphasized the precision and mathematically reasoning so beautifully embodied in Bach. Everett’s Holmes, though no less precise, uses more of his animal instincts and, when all is well, expresses a rich, albeit restrained, joie de vivre.
Speaking of credits, a number of others go into making “The Case of the Silk Stocking” promise a return to the glory days of Granada’s “Sherlock Holmes” adventures starring Brett. Ian Hart plays his Watson with just the right amount of awe and annoyance regarding Holmes; he is also both a strong character in his own right and has a good chemistry with Everett. Hart is everything a good Watson should be, including a flagrant ladies man. Hart brings his own style to his wooings, but he seems every bit as lusty as the Watson played by Edward Hardewicke in the Brett series.
“The Case of the Silk Stocking” was also sharply directed by Simon Cellan Jones, who kept the pace brisk while still allowing time for the audience to be lulled, when appropriate, into a false sense of security. The writing credits are listed, in alphabetical order, as Allan Cubitt and Arthur Conan Doyle. According to The Morning Call online Cubitt, who also adapted “The Hound of the Baskervilles” for the Brett series, refers so “The Case of the Silk Stocking” as a “pastiche” of Arthur Conan Doyle.
It’s great to be excited again about great dramatic mystery on PBS, at least in anticipation of the maintenance of this level of writing, production, and performances. It’s been too many years, at least for my taste, since the glory days of BBC/PBS's “Masterpiece Theater” and "Mystery," series that ignited or helped reinvigorate the careers of such great actors as Jeremy Irons, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson, and Janet McTeer, to name just a few of the extraordinary actors who have appeared in "Masterpiece Theater" or the now defunct "Mystery" series. I hope I’m not singing the praises of the Everett series of Holmes mysteries prematurely. I remind myself not to get too excited about future episodes, since in The Morning Call article, Rupert Everett castigated officials at the BBC as ''lazy and blind and dull'' for repeatedly producing classics in lieu of riskier material.
But then, doesn’t that sound just like something Sherlock Holmes would say?
You can learn more about "Masterpiece Theater’s" production of “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking” by going to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/silkstocking/
BIOGRAPHIES
Jeremy Brett, Sherlock Holmes in the BBC/PBS production “Mystery” from 1984 until his death in 1995.
Jeremy Brett was born Peter Jeremy William Huggins on November 3, 1933. In 1958, Jeremy Brett married the actress, Anna Massey (daughter of Raymond Massey), but they divorced in 1962. They had a son named David Huggins, born 1959, who is now a successful British novelist. In 1976 Brett married American PBS producer Joan Wilson, but she died of cancer in 1985. Brett was devastated by Wilson's untimely death and he never remarried. Brett's heart had been damaged by a childhood case of rheumatic fever, and was apparently further weakened by the various drugs prescribed to control his manic depressive episodes, particularly Lithium salt, and by his heavy cigarette smoking. He died at age 61 on September 12, 1995 at his home in London.
Rupert Everett, Sherlock Holmes in the BBC/PBS production of “Masterpiece Theater,” the first installment of the new Holmes episodes having premiered on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005. In the New York/Tri-State area, “Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Silk Stocking” is scheduled to be repeated Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, 10:00 pm EST. Check your local listings.
Rupert James Hector Everett was born May 29, 1959 in Norfolk, England to Major Anthony Michael Everett and Sara MacLean, who was Scottish, and descended from the baronets Vyvyan of Trelowarren and the German Schmiedern barons. From the age of 7, he was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, but dropped out of school at 15 and ran away to London to become an actor. In order to support himself he worked as a prostitute, or "rent boy" — as he later admitted to US magazine in 1997. After dropping out of the Central School of Speech and Drama, he travelled to Scotland and got a job in the avant-garde Citizen's Theater of Glasgow.
His break came with the 1982 West End production of “Another Country,” playing a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh, followed by a film version in 1984 with Colin Firth. He began to develop a promising film career, until he co-starred with Bob Dylan in the huge flop “Hearts of Fire” (1987). In 1989 he moved to Paris, writing a novel Hello, Darling, Are You Working? and coming out as gay, a move which some at the time perceived as damaging to his career. Returning to the public eye in “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), several films of variable success followed. In 1995 he released a second novel, The Hairdresser of St. Tropez.
Everett's career was revitalized by “My Best Friend's Wedding” (1997), playing Julia Roberts's gay friend. In 1999, he played Madonna's gay best friend in “The Next Best Thing.” His film career has been up and down since then [unless you consider yet another dud with Madonna an “up.”] Perhaps more notably, Everett has done several high “ear-file” voice roles such as that of Prince Charming in “Shrek 2.” He also writes for Vanity Fair.
Rgirl
Adam Dalgliesh. Martin Shaw is :no: 
