10 Movie Characters That Sequels Totally Forgot

Part help and part hindrance, Inspector Lestrade is a fixture of Sherlock Holmes stories and adaptations across the decades, the great detective's perennial contact in the world of regular policing.

For Guy Ritchie's punchy, action-packed take on Holmes, Eddie Marsan gave us a capable but frustrated version of Lestrade. In this movie he is the one to instigate the plot and bring Holmes into it, first by arresting the villainous Lord Blackwood in the opening scenes and then again by asking for Holmes's assistance after Blackwood appears to have survived his hanging and escaped his tomb.

Lestrade has a small but significant role throughout the movie, helping with Holmes's scheme to get himself arrested in order to gather further evidence, for example. But he was mysteriously almost completely absent from Moriarty-battling sequel A Game Of Shadows.

It's only when, right at the end, he shows up to seize Moriarty's wealth and donate it to anti-war causes that A Game Of Shadows even seems to remember that such a person as Inspector Lestrade ever existed.

Still, Marsan doesn't seem to bear a grudge as he can currently be seen in Ritchie's latest, The Gentlemen.