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 (2014 TV series)
Following the broadcast of "The Three Musketeers" from 2009 to 2010, Kōki Mitani planned to adapt "The Brothers Karamazov" to a puppetry. Despite his love for the stories of Sherlock Holmes, Mitani was reluctant to adapt the series into puppetry due to the difficulty in describing the details of investigations through the operation of puppets. He also worried that it was too late to produce a Sherlock Holmes series as "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" gained popularity and the modern adaptation "Sherlock" had already received a reputation. Then he planned to make a puppet with the spitting image of Sherlock Holmes drawn by Sidney Paget but abandoned the idea as tall puppets are difficult for puppeteers to operate. Mitani then decided to make it a show set in a fictional boarding school called "Beeton School" with Sherlock Holmes as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. Though many incidents occur in the school, there are no murders and the same puppets appear many times. According to Mitani, as the story progresses it will be revealed to viewers the full picture of why the show is set in a school. All four novels of the canon – "A Study in Scarlet", "The Sign of the Four", "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Valley of Fear" – are dramatised in the puppetry, which Mitani says may be the first case among screen adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's work.