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 (1939 film series)
The two 20th Century Fox films—"The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"—had survived complete and in good condition, but those in the Universal series suffered badly over the years, as they passed through the hands of different copyright owners. In 1993 the UCLA Film and Television Archive started a restoration project on the series after the unstable cellulose nitrate film was found to be suffering from deterioration. Restoration on the first six films—"The Woman in Green", "The Pearl of Death", "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon", "The Scarlet Claw", "Terror by Night" and "The Spider Woman"—took four years from 1993; the costs for the restoration were met by UCLA and Hugh Hefner, who was a fan of the Rathbone-Holmes series. From 1998 Warner Bros. matched Hefner's funding and the remaining six films—"Dressed to Kill", "Pursuit to Algiers", "Sherlock Holmes Faces Death", "The House of Fear", "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror" and "Sherlock Holmes in Washington"—were then restored, a process that was completed in 2001.