With his patrician profile, curled lip and a drawl like velvet-coated steel, Douglas Wilmer was, for many aficionados of all things Arthur Conan Doyle, the definitive Sherlock Holmes. He first played the detective in a one-off BBC pilot entitled The Speckled Band (1964), which was so well received that he was hired for a further 12 episodes the next year. However, he turned down the opportunity to reprise the role when another series was commissioned, describing the production as a “disagreeable experience”.
Wilmer was attracted to the role because of the opportunity to explore a character closer to one that Doyle had intended rather than the sanitised “Victorian hero” of early television outings. “He was a surprisingly unfashionable individual for a Victorian writer to portray, really — completely unsentimental in a very sentimental age.”
He emphasised Holmes’s darker side: the sardonic humour, the arrogance and the complete lack of consideration for everyone else, in particular his stoic sidekick Watson, who was played by Nigel Stock. Wilmer’s ambitions for Sherlock Holmes were not always shared by the BBC. Annoyed at being palmed off with mediocre directors, Wilmer lobbied for change. He described the reaction as being “as if Harvey Nichols had asked the head of Harrods for the loan of his best salesman in Christmas week”. Equally problematic was the quality of the scripts and lack of rehearsal time. Years later, Wilmer said: “The scripts came in late and some of them I rejected and rewrote myself.”
Like many actors who took on the role of the great detective, Wilmer found that Sherlock Holmes was not easy to shake off. He was persuaded by Gene Wilder to reprise the character for the parody, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975); he played a Holmesian detective in a TV series entitled The Rivals Of Sherlock Holmes (1973) and he recorded the stories for a BBC audio cassette. Most recently, he had a cameo in an episode of the TV series Sherlock.
Douglas Wilmer was born in 1920 in Middlesex, but spent his childhood in Hong Kong where his father worked as an accountant. At the age of 13, he was sent to school in England, boarding at King’s School, Canterbury, and Stonyhurst College. He did not see his parents for five years. His introduction to the stage came by chance. The headmaster, visiting a school production of Richard of Bordeaux, decided to recast the role of the archbishop. He picked Wilmer for “his scoundrelly looks”. When the actress Dame Sybil Thorndike watched the play, she singled him out for praise.
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A scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), a place he described as “surprisingly old-fashioned”, was interrupted when Wilmer was called up during the Second World War. After serving in West Africa, he was invalided out of the army with tuberculosis. The disease prevented him from becoming a father. His acting career began alongside his first wife, Elizabeth Melville, who had been with him at Rada. Roles in the West End followed, with positive critical notices. His marriage though ended in divorce — as did a second to a woman 28 years younger than him — but his third, to Anne Harding, who was from Malta, lasted 30 years. She survives him.
Forthright and impatient, Wilmer was never afraid to speak his mind, which sometimes held back his career. He had a reputation for giving short shrift to colleagues whom he felt were underperforming and had a particularly notorious run-in with the director Anthony Mann on the set of El Cid in 1961. After many takes of a stoning scene in which Wilmer was pelted with fake rocks, the actor finally lost patience and hurled one back at his director. Other films included Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Patton (1970), and Anthony And Cleopatra (1972).
When Wilmer retired, he pursued an interest in painting and opened a wine bar in his home town, Woodbridge, in Suffolk. It was called “Sherlock’s”.
Douglas Wilmer, actor, was born on January 9, 1920. He died on March 31, 2016, aged 96