Fifty-Four

Jeremy Brett:The lost Sherlock Holmes interview (Part 2)

Posted on April 16, 2007. Filed under: Books, Television |

During the course of filming the Sherlock Holmes TV series Brett changed the character’s hairstyle, from the traditional swept back look to a more radical, shorter, brushed forward cut. I asked him why the style had been changed.

“It’s so trivial it’s hardly worth mentioning… But, the thing is when you wear your hair as I was, and am wearing it again now, I have to gel my hair. Now gel is a very nasty thing to wear on a daily basis especialy when it’s as severe as it has to be. And sometimes when I have been filming I’ve had to gel twice in one day. And you really feel like a… It sets like cement, and it’s very uncomfortable. And I thought if I could get the same effect with short hair – and, I think, to a large degree I did – then I wouldn’t have to gel… gung my hair. So that’s why I did it and I think it worked. I think it made a nice change.”

Brett told me he had drawn inspiration for the style from one of Sydney Paget’s original ‘Strand Magazine’ illustrations of Holmes, “the one where [he] is drawing up his knees up under his chin. He is smoking the small clay pipe he uses when in one of his meditative moods.” The portrait, from ‘The Red-Headed League,’ shows the great detective in profile, and does resemble the hairstyle Brett had in later episodes of TV’s ‘The Return of Sherlock Holmes.’
 “I have gone back to the old one, because the terribly dangerous thing about the short one was that it could also look modern. I remember when I first had it done, I walked down the street and saw someone walking toward me with almost exactly the same haircut, and I thought, oh god!

“The one I have now is also wrong, for me anyway, for it looks too much like Noel Coward. Nancy Banks Smith, who I call the Bag Lady of Fleet Street, was very unkind about ‘Scandal in Bohemia,’ she wrote that when I took my makeup off, as the disguise of the groom, there was Noel Coward underneath. And these little things get under your skin you know, and it really upset me that. So I thought I’d try something else… And anyway f..k her, if you’ll excuse the expression. Now I have gone back to this.”

Nancy Banks Smith, at the time the ‘Guardian’ newspaper’s TV critic, actually praised ‘Scandal in Bohemia.’ She described it as “luxurious, even luscious, way of passing the time.” Her remarks about Brett’s Holmes resembling Noel Coward were obviously light hearted. Brett’s reaction to the review seems to be uncalled for in the extreme.

Brett told Holmes expert David Stuart Davies that he changed his hair so that, “I can play with [it], run my fingers through it, ruffle it… it’s something else to help me play the character.” His second Watson, Edward Hardwicke, believed he cut his hair because he had begun to hate the character of Holmes. It may have been a combination of the three different reasons Brett gave for the change (and Hardwicke’s conjecture) – the problem with gel, it added to the characterisation and as a reaction to criticism. However, I think the latter had the most weight, as he told me (after first blaming the gel) that his real upset at the criticism was why he thought he’d “try something else.” During the course of the interview he would often return to the subject of his reaction to Bank’s Smith remark. For instance, he quite plainly told me, “It is true that little remarks can get under your skin. I mean little things like that… and that’s why I changed my hairstyle…” His then five year held resentment says less about Bank’s Smith’s review and more about his insecurities and emotional fragility. When I asked him how he reacted to negative criticism of his portrayal of Holmes – particularly from some sections of the American Sherlockian fan community – he changed suddenly from being friendly and open to being tetchy and defensive.

 “I have had nothing but praise. I have received twelve plaques from twelve societies for being the best Holmes ever. I haven’t heard any negative criticism [from America]… I was over there in ’85 and I think we had got as far as number seven [in the first TV series] and I was given the plaque for the best Holmes ever then by the Sherlockians and the Doylians.”

Brett, however, did admit that he believed any actor playing Holmes would find it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve universal acceptance in the role.

 “The trouble is… what you’re actually doing as an actor, if you’re playing a part as famous as this creation of Doyle, is all I’m doing is a brass rubbing. Everyone is Holmes men women and children. Everyone has their own image of Holmes, I have my own image of Sherlock Holmes, we all do. We all have a picture of him when we read the stories, and therefore, you’re just doing a kind of brass rubbing of it. A transparency of it, which one hopes isn’t going to upset the image the other people have of him.

“In New York I saw this six foot four Blackman, walking along with a deerstalker and meerschaum pipe, and I thought, there you are he’s tripping, he’s Sherlock Holmes today.

“Then we had the Sherlock Holmes Society in New York, and they met me to give me this thing, and I walked in, and I was the only one dressed as a civilian. Everyone else was dressed as either Holmes, or Watson, or Moriarty, or Irene Adler, or as Mrs Hudson. But I suddenly thought, of course, what one is doing is only an impression, that’s all actors can do to a monument like this.

“Bennet the chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London came down to see me in Guilford, and was terribly sweet. He showed me a picture of the unveiling of a statue of Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. And it was back to the big ears, the hooked nose, and the deerstalker, and meerschaum pipe. But, that is the image, that is the cliché. That’s the way it will be for so many.”

However, Brett said he had one consolation:

“I have this lovely blessing over my head; Dame Jean Conan Doyle says I am the Sherlock Holmes of her childhood. That helps a lot… I don’t have to think of Nancy Banks Smith very often!”

By this point in the interview Jeremy Brett’s good humour had returned to a certain extent. When our conversation was almost drowned out by fire engine sirens from outside, he jokingly said, “I am sorry about this noise I think London’s on fire!”

I ended my original version of the interview with the following observation, which I believe still holds true nearly twenty years on.

 ‘Jeremy Brett’s Holmes is fundamentally faithful to Doyle’s original. The magnetism of his bravura performance attracts a new generation of admirers to the stories. In the years to come it will be his face they see when they read the books, and it will be his voice they hear when the great detective speaks. A little part of the monument, that is the legend of Sherlock Holmes, has Brett’s name indelibly carved on it.’

Make a Comment