Basil Rathbone

Distant cousin of Maj. Henry Rathbone, who was part of President Abraham Lincoln's theater party the night he was assassinated. Maj. Rathbone himself was stabbed by John Wilkes Booth as the latter was escaping, but the wound was not fatal. Rathbone later married Clara Harris, who was also in the Lincoln party, but he killed her in an insane rage on December 23, 1883 and spent the rest of his life in an insane asylum. He had suffered from what would now be characterized as a form of PTSD ever since the assassination.

Basil Rathbone was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1892, but three years later his family was forced to flee the country because his father was accused by the Boers of being a British spy at a time when Dutch-British conflicts were leading to the Boer War. The Rathbones escaped to England, where Basil and his two younger siblings, Beatrice and John, were raised. Their mother, Anna Barbara (George), was a violinist, who was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, of British parents, and their father, Edgar Philip Rathbone, was a mining engineer born in Liverpool.

From 1906 to 1910 Rathbone attended Repton School, where he was more interested in sports--especially fencing, at which he excelled--than studies, but where he also discovered his interest in the theater. After graduation he planned to pursue acting as a profession, but his father disapproved and suggested that his son try working in business for a year, hoping he would forget about acting. Rathbone accepted his father's suggestion and worked as a clerk for an insurance company--for exactly one year. Then he contacted his cousin Frank Benson, an actor managing a Shakespearean troupe in Stratford-on-Avon. Rathbone was hired as an actor on the condition that he work his way through the ranks, which he did quite rapidly.

Starting in bit parts in 1911, he was playing juvenile leads within two years.

In 1915 his career was interrupted by the First World War. During his military service, as a second lieutenant in the Liverpool Scottish 2nd Battalion, he worked in intelligence and received the Military Cross for bravery.

In 1919, released from military service, he returned to Stratford-on-Avon and continued with Shakespeare but after a year moved onto the London stage.

During the 1920s his roles had evolved from the romantic lead to the suave lady-killer to the sinister villain (usually wielding a sword), and Hollywood put him to good use during the 1930s in numerous costume romps, including Captain Blood (1935), David Copperfield (1935), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Tower of London (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940) and others.

The year after that he made his first appearance on Broadway and his film debut in the silent Innocent (1921). For the remainder of the decade Rathbone alternated between the London and New York stages and occasional appearances in films.

In 1929 he co-wrote and starred as the title character in a short-running Broadway play called "Judas". Soon afterwards he abandoned his first love, the theater, for a film career.

Is one of 13 actors who have received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of a real-life king. The others in chronological order are Charles Laughton for The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933), Robert Morley for Marie Antoinette (1938), Laurence Olivier for Henry V (1944) and Richard III (1955), José Ferrer for Joan of Arc (1948), Yul Brynner for King and I, The (1956), John Gielgud for Becket (1964), Peter O'Toole for Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968), Robert Shaw for A Man for All Seasons (1966), Richard Burton for Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), Kenneth Branagh for Henry V (1989), Nigel Hawthorne for The Madness of King George (1994), and Colin Firth for The King's Speech (2010).

Although he has been immortalized as a screen villain, before he played Murdstone in 1935 he had never played a villain and was known, both on film and stage, exclusively as a matinée idol and romantic leading man.

Rathbone earned two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and as King Louis XI in If I Were King (1938).

He has two roles in common with Tom Baker: (1) Rathbone played Sir Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) while Baker played him in The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood (1984) and (2) Rathbone played Sherlock Holmes in 14 films from The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) to The Mystery of Sherlock Holmes: Dressed To Kill (1946) and Baker played him in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982).

However, it was in 1939 that Rathbone played his best-known and most popular character, Sherlock Holmes, with Nigel Bruce as Dr.

Watson, first in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and then in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), which were followed by 12 more films and numerous radio broadcasts over the next seven years.

He campaigned in vain for the role of Lord Henry Wotton in the film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). He believed that his typecasting as Sherlock Holmes cost him the role and was a contributing factor in his leaving the Universal series.

Feeling that his identification with the character was killing his film career, Rathbone went back to New York and the stage in 1946. The next year he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Dr. Sloper in the Broadway play "The Heiress," but afterwards found little rewarding stage work.

Won Broadway's 1948 Tony Award as Best Actor (Dramatic) for his performance as Dr. Sloper in the original Broadway production of "The Heiress". The award was shared with Henry Fonda for "Mister Roberts" and Paul Kelly for "Command Decision".

His final appearance as Sherlock Holmes was in a play written by his wife Ouida Bergère, appropriately titled "Sherlock Holmes". The production opened on Broadway on October 30, 1953, and lasted only three performances.

His autobiography "In and Out of Character," was written in 1956 but not published until 1961.

He was due to appear in 'Blood Beast Terror' (1968) with Peter Cushing but died before filming started.

The Sherlock Holmes-esque Basil of Baker Street in The Great Mouse Detective (1986) is named after Rathbone, who was perhaps best known for the many times he played Sherlock Holmes.