Sherlock Holmes: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

5 Awesome Performances...

5. Robert Stephens - The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes

Viewed at the time as an over-ambitious, over-priced, misfiring folly from Hollywood great Billy Wilder and his Some Like It Hot co-writer I.A.L. Diamond, The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes is an oddball film whose reputation has continually improved with age. Critic Kim Newman, who has penned his own Holmes novels, has called it "the best Sherlock Holmes movie ever made", while Sherlock creator Mark Gatiss also numbers himself among the movie's fans and credits it as one of his major influences. Stephens, an enormously respected Shakespearean stage actor, never really had the film career of some of his theatrical contemporaries, not least then-wife Maggie Smith, but here gives what is probably the standout performance of all his work for the big screen. Stephens' pronounced, dramatic, and rather theatrical line readings are perfect for delivering the barbed quips and witty back-and-forth exchanges in Wilder and Diamond's irreverant, sardonic script, full of attempts affectionately to deconstruct and satirise the popular cinematic image of Holmes. It is in the character's more quiet, melancholy side that he excels, though, perfectly playing the understated and unrequited romantic subtext that he develops towards Colin Blakely's Watson.