Sherlock Holmes: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

1. Basil Rathbone - The Hound Of The Baskervilles

South African born Shakespearean stage actor and First World War intelligence officer Rathbone had a rich, diverse career, giving notable performances as the villain in the swashbuckling adventures of Zorro and Robin Hood, but once he started appearing as Holmes in 1939 all of that was forgotten as Rathbone and the detective became forever linked in the popular imagination. Of his fourteen appearances as the eccentric consulting detective, the first two, made for 20th Century Fox as glossy, high budget Victorian adventures, stand out as the classic interpretations of the character and Conan Doyle's stories. Even the later Universal pictures, made for a much lower budget and updated to the contemporary world of the Nazi-battling 1940s, have their merits, though, thanks to Rathbone's compelling lead performance. Rathbone makes for a suave, effortlessly capable and quick-witted Holmes with an eager edge and a hungriness to get to the bottom of each case. That later performances and performers of the role have tended to refer back to Rathbone, or construct revisionist versions of the character in contrast with his, indicates just how definitive his Holmes is. Now that we've seen the best examples of perfection in detection, let's take a look at the actors whose appalling performances as Holmes were practically criminal...