Peter O’Toole and Sherlock Holmes
The attenuated and gaunt look of Peter O’Toole would surely make him the obvious choice for a screen Sherlock, and yet it happened rarely enough. I reported last time that O’Toole voiced the detective in an animated version of ‘Valley of Fear’ of 1983, and in fact did the same for three other Australian animations of Holmes tales, ‘The Sign of Four’, The Baskerville Curse’ and ‘A Study in Scarlet’.
However, for different reasons he missed out on at least two
other incarnations of the detective. Billy Wilder had him in mind for the 1970 spoof
film ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’, with Peter Sellers as Watson (that
would have been some casting!) but finally opted for Robert Stephens and Colin
Blakeley.
In 1979 he was initially cast as Holmes in the Jack the
Ripper mystery, ‘Murder by Decree’, with Laurence Olivier as Watson. However,
the two gigantic egos, who had worked together before when Olivier directed the
young O’Toole as Hamlet in 1963, couldn’t get along, and the director opted for
the less volatile pairing of Christopher Plummer and James Mason, who received
special praise for his more thoughtful Watson.
In 1976 O’Toole played three detectives (Holmes, Lord Peter
Wimsey and Philip Marlowe) on stage in Australia in the wonderfully titled
‘Dead Eyed Dicks’ by Peter King.
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And, against physical type this time, he played Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself in the 1997 fantasy film, ‘Fairy Tale, a True Story’, about the Cottingley fairies (left).
Oh, but how I’d loved to have seen him in that Billy Wilder
film with Peter Sellers, fake Loch Ness monster and all.
