Sherlock Holmes early 1900s, H. A. Saintsbury took over the role from Gillette for a tour of the play. Between this play and Conan Doyle's own stage adaptation of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", Saintsbury portrayed Holmes over 1,000 times. Basil Rathbone played Holmes and Nigel Bruce played Watson in fourteen U.S. films (two for 20th Century Fox and a dozen for Universal Pictures) from 1939 to 1946, and in "The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" on the Mutual radio network from 1939 to 1946 (before the role of Holmes passed to Tom Conway). While the Fox films were period pieces,
Basil Rathbone produced by Fox in 1939), were set in the late Victorian times of the original stories. The later installments, produced by Universal, beginning with "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror" (1942), were set in contemporary times. The first three had World War II-related plots. Concurrent with the films, Rathbone and Bruce reprised their film roles in a radio series, "The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", which began in October 1939. Rathbone appeared in the radio series as long as the film series was active, but after the films lapsed in 1946, Rathbone ceded his radio part to Tom Conway.