Sherlock Holmes (1939 film series) "Rathbone "was" Sherlock Holmes". The choice of Nigel Bruce as Watson was more contentious, with Davies pointing out that "Bruce's characterisation bore little relation" to the written Watson, even though the portrayal eventually produced "an endearingly avuncular figure". The historian David Parkinson agrees, and wrote that Bruce's "avuncular presence provided the perfect counterbalance to Rathbone's briskly omniscient sleuth". Barnes notes that, despite the criticisms against him, Bruce rehabilitated Watson, who had been a marginal figure in the cinematic Holmes canon to that point: "after Bruce, it would be a near-unthinkable heresy to show Holmes without him". With the combination of
Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes Vasily Livanov as Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Watson. Livanov earned honorary membership Order of the British Empire for a performance ambassador Anthony Brenton described as "one of the best I've ever seen". In 1983, Ian Richardson portrayed Sherlock Holmes in "The Sign of Four" with David Healy as Dr. John H. Watson. Later that same year, Richardson again played Holmes in a version of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" with Donald Churchill as his Watson. In 1986, a TV movie called "My Tenderly Loved Detective" was made in Soviet Union about the adventures of the female Sherlock Holmes, called