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The Best Dr. Watson Has Died

05-19-2011 by Linda S. Carbonell

The closest Edward Hardwicke ever came to being an LGBT icon was taking the role of Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes in the incredible British television series. People have always wanted to suggest that Holmes and Watson were really secret lovers. It was irrelevant. They were two of the most enduring characters in English literature.

When Jeremy Brett accepted the role of Holmes he fulfilled every Holmes fanatic’s fantasy – the physically perfect Holmes, as close to the original Strand illustrations as humanly possible. Brett also brought an aristocrat’s breeding and upbringing to the role and an ability to play someone wound tighter than a watch spring. Casting Watson was harder. David Burke, the original Watson in the series, was never quite right. Maybe he was too young. Edward Hardwicke replaced him in the second season.

Where Brett was literally an aristocrat, related to the Viscounts of both Malvern and Esher and an heir to the Cadbury chocolate fortune, Hardwicke was a theatrical aristocrat. His father was the great Sir Cedric Hardwicke and his mother actress Helena Pickard. After a brief spell in America as a child, Hardwicke was returned to England where, following service in the Royal Air Force, he progressed through the best that England had to offer for a young actor – The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the Old Vic in Bristol, Lawrence Olivier’s National Theatre company.

Dr. Watson is really a thankless role. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hated writing the stories, did them for the money, regretted their popularity. It showed in his disregard for Watson – shifting wives on him, downplaying his medical career, making him appear stupid, barely mentioning his service in the Afghan War. Hardwicke brought flesh, blood, intelligence, experience and humanity to the role. I have long suspected that the producers and writer respected the actor, and thus gave him the latitude to make Watson a real person and not just a foil to Holmes. The timing of the Holmes series was prophetic in a way. Running from 1986 to1994, it was still fresh enough in some people’s minds to act as a warning seven years later when America and Britain invaded Afghanistan in response to 9-11. Watson had been there, done that more than a century earlier. Stories in the Holmes canon were built around the British experience in Afghanistan. The greatest empire on earth had been brought to its knees by a people still stuck in the 12^th century in a country of desert mountains.

I was recently thinking about the series, because of the royal wedding. In A Scandal In Bohemia, the king says that Irene Adler, the beautiful actress who spoiled all of Holmes plans to destroy her, would have made an admirable queen. Kate Middleton reminds me of Irene – not born to the purple, but certainly born to the crown. She will be an admirable queen.

Edward Hardwicke passed away on Wednesday of cancer at the age of 78. He is survived by his second wife, Prim Cotton, daughters Kate and Emma, and stepdaughter Claire.

Edward Hardwicke was much more than just Dr. Watson, but for true Holmes fans, he will always be the one, the only John Watson. Thank you, sir.

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