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,
Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes most well known stage actor to portray Holmes, the first was John Webb. Webb assayed Holmes in a play written by Charles Rodgers in 1894. Holmes is tangentially referred to in an unfinished play by L. Frank Baum and Emerson Hough called "The King of Gee-Whiz" (1905). In Langdon McCormick's 1905 play, "The Burglar and the Lady", Holmes is pitted against the fictional criminal A. J. Raffles, created by E. W. Hornung. McCormick did not secure permission from either Doyle or Hornung to use their characters. The calabash pipe is associated with Sherlock Holmes because early portrayers, particularly William Gillette