“give my little impersonations your kindly praise” [MAZA]
Even though Sherlock Holmes holds the record as the literary figure most portrayed on film, it is shocking when we lose an actor who has played the role. The death of Michael Pennington (IMDb) at the age of 82, announced this weekend, takes one such impersonator from us.
His obituary in The Telegraph notes he was “acclaimed for its intelligence and flawless diction”, which one would hope from the founder (with Michael Bogdanov) of the English Shakespeare Company, the author of ten books on his craft, and over a half-century of stage work that any actor would envy.
But Sherlockians recall Pennington for a more particular distinction. In the span of six years, he played both halves of the most legendary archrivalry in literature: Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. Few actors have stood on both sides of the abyss at Reichenbach. Fewer still have done so with his pedigree.
The 80s Sherlock Holmes Renaissance
“and in 1887” [TWIS]
To understand how Pennington landed in Baker Street at all, you have to understand the strange weather of the 1980s. Sherlock Holmes had never quite gone away (he never does), but the decade brought an extraordinary convergence. The Holmes stories had passed into the public domain in Britain in 1980, fifty years after Conan Doyle’s death, and a pair of producers, Sy Weintraub and Otto Plaschkes, seized on the opportunity, signing Ian Richardson for a planned six-film series. Only two were filmed before Granada’s rival production scared the rest off the field — The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, both in 1983 — but Richardson’s urbane, mischievous Holmes set a high bar for the decade.
That rival was, of course, the production at Granada Television in Manchester, where Jeremy Brett began in 1984 what would become the most exhaustive and, for many of us, the definitive screen treatment of the Canon. Brett’s Holmes was a force of nature — sharp, mercurial, and pitched at a key the role had never quite been pitched at before. By 1986, the Granada series was hitting its stride with its own The Return of Sherlock Holmes season, the very title resonating with the centenary that loomed.
For 1887 was the year Sherlock Holmes first appeared print, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, in a story called A Study in Scarlet. The hundredth anniversary did not pass unnoticed: scion societies held celebrations, publishers commissioned new editions, the BBC and broadcasters worldwide commemorated, and producers on both sides of the Atlantic angled for a piece of the moment. It was into this fizzing centenary year that an American TV movie called The Return of Sherlock Holmes (with a sly nod toward both the centenary and the Granada series) arrived on CBS, on January 10, 1987.
A Holmes Out of Time
“The date being—?” [CREE]
The premise was the stuff that gives more traditional Sherlockians hives. A Boston private investigator, Jane Watson (played by Margaret Colin), great-granddaughter of the good doctor, discovers in her ancestral estate a cryogenic capsule containing one Sherlock Holmes — placed there in suspended animation after an attempt on his life by a previously unsuspected brother of Professor Moriarty, who had infected him with bubonic plague. Thawed, cured, and dragged into the late twentieth century, Holmes is hauled off to America to help Jane with a case that draws (loosely) on The Sign of Four: a man named Small, a woman named Morstan, and a long line of grudges.
It is, frankly, a weak premise. It was also a backdoor pilot for a series that never came. The script is uneven, the science is silly, and the second-act tour of suburban America with Holmes marveling at copy machines is exactly what you fear it might be.
And yet Pennington plays Holmes straight: alert, courtly, baffled but never broken, allowing the comedy to come from the world’s strangeness rather than from any softening of the man. His Holmes is tall, ascetic, slightly melancholy, and uncannily watchful. He looks, in fact, the way Holmes is supposed to look.
Reviews at the time were mixed (the New York Times harrumphed about a “felonious assault on the memory of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective”), but the IMDb reviews speak for themselves: more than one of them notes regret that the proposed series was never picked up. The chemistry with Colin worked, and the picture has a small but real cult following.
For those who haven’t seen it, or who’d like to revisit:
From Holmes to the Napoleon of Crime
“I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made” [SIGN]
The TV movie wasn’t Pennington’s only contribution to the Sherlockian entertainment world, though. In November 1992, BBC Radio 4 broadcast its long-running, faithful, story-by-story dramatization of the Canon with Clive Merrison as Holmes and Michael Williams as Watson, an ensemble that would in time produce the first complete radio adaptation of all sixty stories in the Canon.
The story that month was “The Final Problem,” and for the role of Professor James Moriarty, the producers cast Michael Pennington. He returned to the part for “The Adventure of the Empty House,” broadcast in February 1993.
Related:
We spoke with head writer Bert Coules, BSI (“The Whole Art of Detection”) in Episode 69 and actor Clive Merrison in Episode 202.
There is a particular pleasure in this casting. Pennington’s Holmes had been a man of warmth beneath the surface; his Moriarty, in voice alone, was something else — a dry, scholarly, unforgiving intellect. The voice is what does it on the radio, and Pennington’s voice was one of the great instruments of the British stage: deep, deliberate, with that famous “flawless diction” the Telegraph singled out.
He could, when he wanted, make a line of verse sound like a knife being drawn. As Moriarty, he made the famous interview at Baker Street feel exactly as it ought to feel: two enormous minds taking each other’s measure, and one of them appalled at what he sees.
Few actors have played both halves of this rivalry. Orson Welles played Holmes in the 1938 radio adaptation of William Gillette's play and Moriarty in the 1954 radio version of “The Final Problem,” opposite John Gielgud. And Anthony Higgins played the title role in 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993) and the professor who became Moriarty in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985).
Pennington’s Non-Sherlockian Career
“my long professional career” [LION]
None of this, of course, is what Michael Pennington was famous for. He was famous, in Britain, for Shakespeare. He had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company straight out of Trinity College, Cambridge, having never having attended drama school, and he stayed loosely in the company’s orbit for the rest of his career, an Honorary Associate Artist by the end. His Hamlet at the RSC in 1980 was the role for which he turned down The French Lieutenant’s Woman, opposite Meryl Streep. He said simply: “I realised I couldn’t let Hamlet go. It is one of the prizes.”
Two years after that, he played Posthumus in the BBC Cymbeline; the year before Return of Sherlock Holmes, he played Oedipus on the BBC. In 1986 he and Bogdanov founded the English Shakespeare Company, whose seven-play Wars of the Roses cycle toured the world, with Pennington taking Richard II, Prince Hal, Henry V, and Jack Cade.
He was nominated for four Olivier Awards across his career — the first for Mercutio in 1976, the most recent for Antigonus in Kenneth Branagh’s 2015 Winter’s Tale with Judi Dench. At 70, he played King Lear in Brooklyn to ecstatic American notices; the New York Times’ Ben Brantley called it “devastating.” In 2020, in the first weeks of lockdown, he played Prospero in a tiny studio production at the Jermyn Street Theatre — the last great Shakespearean role he had not yet attempted — and the reviewer for the Telegraph noted that “the great globe itself” speech, in his “hypnotically sonorous delivery,” acquired “a charge of almost unbearable poignancy.”
He toured for decades with his one-man Chekhov show; he wrote a book about it; he wrote three Shakespeare user’s guides, a memoir, a book about Lear in Brooklyn, and a book about being an actor called Let Me Play the Lion Too.
He played Jung opposite David Suchet in the BBC’s 1984 Freud. And he was, to a generation of children, the Imperial officer who tells Darth Vader the Emperor is on his way down: Moff Jerjerrod in Return of the Jedi, a part he was good-natured about and slightly bemused by, since he never quite escaped fans asking after it at the stage door.
With Pennington’s dual roles in the Sherlockian world, it would be easy to mention the Reichenbach or him being “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.” Perhaps a more fitting valedictory message to the actor who chose Hamlet over Hollywood and gave half a century to the classics, is a Shakespearean line:
“Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
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