Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes
It has been estimated that Sherlock Holmes is the most prolific screen character in the history of cinema. The first known film featuring Holmes is "Sherlock Holmes Baffled", a one-reel film running less than a minute, made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1900. This was followed by a 1905 Vitagraph film "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom", with H. Kyrle Bellew and J. Barney Sherry in unlisted roles. It was long believed that the film starred Maurice Costello as Sherlock Holmes, but 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
Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes
The actor most associated with Holmes on stage was William Gillette, who wrote, directed, and starred in a popular play entitled "Sherlock Holmes" in seven different productions on Broadway from 1899 (filmed in 1916), while the stories were still being published, to 1930. His version of Holmes, dressed in deerstalker hat and Inverness cape and smoking a large curved calabash pipe, contributed much to the popular image of the character. The deerstalker hat appears occasionally in Paget's original illustrations for "The Strand", but it is by no means a part of Holmes' regular clothing. Doyle's text is even vaguer, referring only to a travelling cap with earflaps in the passages with the relevant illustrations. He is also described as smoking several different types of pipes, varying them with his mood.