Maurice Costello
Costello was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Irish immigrants Ellen (née Fitzgerald; born 1853) and Thomas Costello (born 1852). He made his film debut in 1908, but was long believed to have debuted in "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom" (1905), supposedly playing the lead in what is regarded as the first serious film to feature the character of Sherlock Holmes, since it was preceded only by the 30-second comedy film "Sherlock Holmes Baffled" (1900). However, Holmesian scholar Leslie S. Klinger has written that the identification of Costello in the role is flawed. Klinger states that the first identification of Costello with the role was in Michael Pointer's "Public Life of Sherlock Holmes" published in 1975 but Pointer later realized his error and wrote to Klinger stating
Sherlock Holmes (1954 TV series)
Most of the show's 39 episodes are non-Canonical original adventures, but a few are directly based on Arthur Conan Doyle's stories: "The Case of the French Interpreter" (based on "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"), "The Case of the Pennsylvania Gun" (based on "The Valley of Fear"), "The Case of the Shoeless Engineer" (based on "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"), and "The Case of the Red-Headed League" (based on "The Red-Headed League"). The first episode, "The Case of the Cunningham Heritage," adapts the first section of "A Study in Scarlet", in which Holmes and Watson's relationship is established, and develops an original story from there.