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    Playing Sherlock Holmes: Interviews with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee
    Playing Sherlock Holmes: Interviews with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee
    Playing Sherlock Holmes: Interviews with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee
    Ebook54 pages39 minutes

    Playing Sherlock Holmes: Interviews with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee

    By Michael Pointer

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    About this ebook

    Playing Sherlock Holmes contains three verbatim interviews - with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee - about their very different experiences of appearing as Holmes on stage and screen. The interviews were conducted in 1974. At the time, John Wood was appearing on stage in an acclaimed revival of William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes, a Royal Shakespeare Company production; Robert Stephens had recently completed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes for film director Billy Wilder; and Christopher Lee - who had a role as Mycroft Holmes in that film - had earlier played the lead role in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace. The interviews have been transcribed from tapes held in the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection - Richard Lancelyn Green Bequest at Portsmouth Museum.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChaplin Books
    Release dateNov 15, 2017
    ISBN9781911105282
    Playing Sherlock Holmes: Interviews with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee

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      Book preview

      Playing Sherlock Holmes - Michael Pointer

      Playing Sherlock Holmes

      Interviews with John Wood, Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee

      by Michael Pointer

      Digital edition converted and distributed in 2017

      for Chaplin Books by

      Andrews UK Limited

      www.andrewsuk.com

      Copyright © Michael Pointer and Amanda J Field

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.

      Introduction

      Michael Pointer, author of The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes and The Pictorial History of Sherlock Holmes, both of which dealt with the way Holmes had been portrayed on stage and screen, interviewed a number of actors in the course of his research during the 1970s. He recorded the interviews onto cassette tape and these tapes eventually found their way to avid Holmesian collector Richard Lancelyn Green and (on his death) into the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection - Richard Lancelyn Green Bequest at Portsmouth Museum. Whilst working on the Collection as part of my PhD, I transcribed a number of interviews from the tapes. Those which cast a particularly interesting light on the character of Holmes were the interviews with John Wood, who had been appearing on stage in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes; Robert Stephens, who had starred in the 1970 Billy Wilder film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; and Christopher Lee, who had played Holmes in the ill-fated German film Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) directed by Terence Fisher, but had also played Mycroft Holmes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Henry Baskerville in Hound of the Baskervilles (1959).

      All three interviews were recorded in 1974. I have made minor editing changes for the purpose of clarity and any mistakes in transcription are my own. Revenue from the sales of this ebook will be shared with the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at Portsmouth Museum.

      In each interview, ‘MP’ stands for ‘Michael Pointer’.

      Amanda Field

      1. John Wood

      MP: What I found most enjoyable was the way the production had turned out so well. Anthony Smith [novelist and playwright who was working for the Royal Shakespeare Company] told me this was going to be produced and I said: ‘I’ve read the play over years and, reading it, it seems such a creaky old melodrama.’ And he said: ‘well, that’s what we’ve decided’ and I said: ‘well I hope it will be all right’, and it couldn’t have been more right. It really is the success.

      JW: Yes, it’s certainly an enormous success. I mean it’s the biggest success the RSC’s ever had. It’s actually attracted much more custom than, say, Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is the last really big success.

      MP: I never thought that I’d see Gillette’s play produced in the West End and I think that seeing it now,

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